Arm's Chief Architect on the History of the Arm Architecture

Whilst some computer architects both past and present are famous, others have a lower profile. One of the latter is Arm’s Chief Architect, Richard Grisenthwaite, who according to Arm, has been …

‘… responsible for the long-term evolution of the Arm architecture and has led its development for more than 20 years, beginning with Armv6 … In his early days at Arm, Richard worked on Arm720T, Arm940T, and Arm1136EJF-S. Prior to Arm, Richard worked for Analog Devices on fixed-function DSP, and at Inmos/ST on the Transputer’.

That’s quite an influential career! Richard has probably directly influenced the design of more than 300 billion chips (but doesn’t get a Wikipedia entry!)

So it’s interesting when we get the opportunity to hear him speak. A decade ago, he gave a talk in Cambridge about the history of the Arm architecture. In it he …

… talks about how the ARM architecture and the computing ecosystem it enables has changed in the 25 year history of ARM Ltd. Aimed at a technical audience, this talk looks at how the architecture has been influenced, sometimes in unexpected ways, by the changing environment and fashions, of the computing industry. It draws out some general lessons of the process of balancing the developments in hardware and software learnt from the progression of ARM to be one of the most popular architectures in the world.

Just a minor quibble: I’m not sure there is really a single Arm architecture given that it’s changed quite a bit over the years!

We’ve covered the early history of Arm before (Parts 1, 2 and 3) but this talk takes the story further on to the launch of the 64-bit version of the Arm architecture and a little beyond.

In this post I’ve included a link to an audio recording and a (9,000 word) transcript. It covers many of the key issues in the design of the Arm architecture and includes comparisons with some of Arm’s major competitors over the years.

It’s a terrific and instructive talk. A couple of fun quotes to give a flavour …

And I have to thank Intel at this point for Itanium as being the best example of how not to introduce a new architecture.

And here is a quote about a feature of one of Arm’s architectures …

And there