What is the difference between ARM architecture and the typical architecture in CPUs, and why is it so revolutionary?
In: Engineering
Back in the 90s during the “Mhz (and eventually Ghz) Wars” there was a general focus in chip manufacturing to just push faster clock speeds above all else. Intel was pretty much the king of chip making back then, and for years their x86 architecture design was tailored towards pure clock speed above all other priorities. They chewed through more and more electricity, and generated higher temperatures, but that wasn’t too hard to deal with in PCs.
ARM, on the other hand, focused more on efficiency, which wasn’t in very high demand for PCs, but was useful for various embedded devices and other types of hardware.
Fast forward to the 2000’s, and phones and eventually smartphones and other mobile devices started becoming a much more significant market for chips, and those form factors really benefited from more power efficient and heat efficient chips, so x86 chips were not well suited to this emerging chip market, but ARM was much better suited for it.
And so ARM became a foundation that a lot of today’s chips have built upon.
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