Video Game Empire

The ARM architecture is an instruction set architecture developed by the British company Acorn for its own PCs. In the end, it took more than ten years to show its talents in the mobile Internet era, completely stealing Intel's limelight.

But in the field of PC processors, ARM has never made any achievements. Before Li Xuan's rebirth, the newly released ARM15 wanted to get a piece of the pie in the PC and server fields, but he was frustrated.

The reason is that Intel's influence in the PC field is deeply rooted. The difference between ARM and the existing x86 Windows is obvious. It cannot be compatible with existing software, and the dedicated applications are lacking, which led to the failure of ARM15. In fact, the ARM architecture has not kept pace with Intel's X86 architecture from the very beginning. When it finally closed the technical gap between the two, Intel had already erected a thick invisible barrier in the PC field, and the software compatibility issue alone was enough to deter potential users.

Those application developers will not put a lot of research and development effort into a new processor that is in doubt as to Intel's x86 architecture. If users want to adopt a new processor, they must suffer from a lack of optional software.

Not only ARM, but all other RISC (reduced instruction set) architecture processors have never posed a real threat to Intel in the PC field. Intel's processors have never been technologically advanced. On the contrary, for a long time, Intel's new CPUs have been criticized by the industry for nothing.

However, with the advantage of forward compatibility, Intel saves the cost of developing software developers from scratch. It just relies on CISC (complex instruction set), which is backward and inefficient among all the population, and should be swept into the historical garbage heap, sweeping across the PC field. all competitors. The RISC architecture simply cannot gain a foothold in the field of personal PCs, and can only move to the field of workstations and servers in the end.

Although according to the original trajectory of history, using ARM and Intel's X86 to fight head-to-head, the future is gloomy. But Li Xuan did not believe in this evil, because he understood the reason why ARM in the previous life could not stand in the PC field - time.

ARM can be said to be a typical representative of untimely birth. In Li Xuan's view, it is five years later than the time that he should have realized, and it has fallen behind when it came out. And Acorn's financial status has been poor and R&D spending is very limited, creating a vicious circle.

The backward technology makes ARM processors unable to bring profits to Acorn, and Acorn, which is not profitable, cannot expand its R&D investment to catch up with Intel X86. As a result, ARM has fallen behind in the competition with X86, step by step, and has never had the opportunity to compete head-on on the same starting line.

In 1990, with the support of Apple and VLSI Technology, ARM became independent from Acorn and established a brand-new Arm Technology. At that time, the new company had only twelve people in total. It was not until TI and Nokia joined the ARM camp that Arm's financial situation improved, and the number of employees in the company finally reached fifty in 1993.

However, technology research and development is a very fair field, and there will be output only if there is input. With only so few people in Amou Technology, even if one person can be used as ten people, it is far less than Intel, which has thousands of R&D personnel. Therefore, ARM decisively turned to mobile communications and other fields, avoiding direct competition with Intel.

When Anmou Technology was struggling in the mobile field, it was finally unwilling to continue to be on the sidelines and was determined to attack the PC field again, but this time he had to face not only technical competition, but also an invisible market. monopoly. In fact, Intel has always been ambitious in the mobile field, ARM's private space. As a result, both parties failed miserably in their mutual attempts. In a field where the other party has formed a market monopoly, it is too difficult to gain a foothold.

It was precisely because Li Xuan was familiar with this history that he discovered the opportunity of ARM, an opportunity that came only five years in advance. Before IBM's PC was put into the market, the most popular microcomputer in the computer field was undoubtedly Apple's Apple series. Apple I and Apple II used MOS6502 processors, while Intel's 8086 was not conspicuous.

IBM saw the rapid commercialization of microcomputers represented by Apple, which largely replaced IBM's mid-range and mainframe markets. The company's profits in 1979 first experienced negative growth. So IBM executives decided to quickly launch a competitive microcomputer to regain the market, and this is the IBM PC.

PC did not allow IBM to achieve dominance in the era of personal computers, but it achieved the Wintel alliance that affected the fundamental pattern of the entire information technology era. Countless PC-compatible machine manufacturers have told reporters bitterly that selling a computer can earn 100 yuan, of which Intel took 70 yuan and Microsoft took 40 yuan. The mystery of this sentence is unforgettable.

But if ARM can block IBM's PCs before the Wintel alliance is formed, everything in the future will be unknown. Using 32-bit ARM2 and the same 32-bit 80386 for PK, ARM2 is naturally far inferior. But if you compare it with the 16-bit 80286, it is superior in terms of computing performance, not to mention the 8086 and the castrated version of the 8088.

Of course, the real market competition is not simply stacking data. The ARM architecture designed by RISC has simple and practical advantages compared to the X86 architecture designed by CISC, but it is not without disadvantages. For example, the processor of RISC architecture has a higher demand for memory capacity due to its fast operation speed.

But this is already the best solution Li Xuan can think of against Intel, the future giant. The rebirth halo is not a panacea, and he can't make a brand new processor comparable to the X86 out of thin air. As for letting him develop it himself, he really doesn't have the confidence.

In his previous life, he was just an ordinary member of countless engineers in Silicon Valley, and he was far from being a tech giant with excellent R&D capabilities~www.readwn.com~ There are only a few familiar instruction set architectures in his previous life. Among them, the ARM architecture is very important to Li Xuanlai. It is undoubtedly the most familiar. As an embedded developer, he knows more about ARM than his girlfriend's body. This is also the confidence of Li Xuan's decision to get ARM out in advance.

Taking 10,000 steps back, even in the competition with X86, it is no big deal that ARM still repeats the mistakes of the previous life. Li Xuan grasped ARM in advance, which is equivalent to grasping the future era of mobile communication, at least there is a way out.

The full name of ARM is called AcornRISCMachine (Aikon (Company) Reduced Instruction Set Machine), since Li Xuan decided to start with it in this life, its name will naturally be changed to become EastRISCMachine (Eastern (Company) Reduced Instruction Set Machine) , referred to as ERM.

The ERM processor research and development team is naturally the most important topic in the semiconductor laboratory, and it is given priority to meet all the requirements in terms of funds, equipment, personnel, and venues. Although Professor Zhao Weiming is the general leader of the research group, Li Xuan is actually the real commander of the brain.

At first, Zhao Weiming just regarded Li Xuan as a promising student, but with the contact and familiarity between the two, Li Xuan did not deliberately hide his strength. The whimsical ideas he kept coming up with were shocking for the first time, and then became numb after a lot of times. Zhao Weiming had long since noticed it.

He just thinks that he has really lived on pigs for so many years? Fortunately, most of the people who are engaged in technology are relatively simple. Zhao Weiming just regards Li Xuan as a technical genius that has not been encountered in a century. After all, there is not no such prodigy in the field of science and technology.