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The ARM architecture (previously, the Advanced RISC Machine , and prior to that Acorn RISC Machine ) is a 32-bit RISC processor architecture developed by ARM Limited that is widely used in embedded designs. Because of their power saving features, ARM CPUs are dominant in the mobile electronics market, where low power consumption is a critical design goal.

Today, the ARM family accounts for approximately 75% of all embedded 32-bit RISC CPUs, making it one of the most widely used 32-bit architectures. ARM CPUs are found in most corners of consumer electronics, from portable devices (PDAs, mobile phones, media players, handheld gaming units, and calculators) to computer peripherals (hard drives, desktop routers); however it no longer has significant penetration as the main processor in the desktop computer market and has never been used in a supercomputer or cluster. Important branches in this family include Marvell's XScale and the Texas Instruments OMAP series.

History

The ARM design was started in 1983 as a development project at Acorn Computers Ltd to build a compact RISC CPU. Led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, a key design goal was achieving low-latency input/output (interrupt) handling like the MOS Technology 6502 used in Acorn's existing computer designs. The 6502's memory access architecture allowed developers to produce fast machines without the use of costly direct memory access hardware. The team completed development samples called ARM1 by April 1985, and the first "real" production systems as ARM2 the following year.

The ARM2 featured a 32-bit data bus, a 26-bit (64 Mbyte) address space and sixteen 32-bit registers. Program code had to lie within the first 64 Mbyte of the memory, as the program counter was limited to 26 bits because the top 6 bits of the 32-bit register served as status flags. The ARM2 was possibly the simplest useful 32-bit microprocessor in the world, with only 30,000 transistors (compare with Motorola's six-year older 68000 model with around 70,000 transistors). Much of this simplicity comes from not having microcode (which represents about one-quarter to one-third of the 68000) and, like most CPUs of the day, not including any cache. This simplicity led to its low power usage, while performing better than the Intel 80286. A successor, ARM3 , was produced with a 4KB cache, which further improved performance.

In the late 1980s Apple Computer and VLSI Technology started working with Acorn on newer versions of the ARM core. The work was so important that Acorn spun off the design team in 1990 into a new company called Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. For this reason, ARM is sometimes expanded as Advanced RISC Machine instead of Acorn RISC Machine. Advanced RISC Machines became ARM Ltd when its parent company, ARM Holdings plc, floated on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998.

The new Apple-ARM work would eventually turn into the ARM6 , first released in 1991. Apple used the ARM6-based ARM 610 as the basis for their Apple Newton PDA. In 1994, Acorn used the ARM 610 as the main CPU in their Risc PC computers. DEC licensed the ARM6 architecture (which caused some confusion because they also produced the DEC Alpha) and produced the StrongARM . At 233 MHz this CPU drew only 1 watt of power (more recent versions draw far less). This work was later passed to Intel as a part of a lawsuit settlement, and Intel took the opportunity to supplement their aging i960 line with the StrongARM. Intel later developed its own high performance implementation known as XScale which it has since sold to Marvell.

The ARM core has remained largely the same size throughout these changes. ARM2 had 30,000 transistors, while the ARM6 grew to only 35,000. ARM's business has always been to sell IP cores, which licensees use to create microcontrollers and CPUs based on this core. The most successful implementation has been the ARM7TDMI with hundreds of millions sold in almost every kind of microcontroller equipped device. The idea is that the Original Design Manufacturer combines the ARM core with a number of optional parts to produce a complete CPU, one that can be built on old semiconductor fabs and still deliver substantial performance at a low cost. As of January 2008, over 10 billion ARM cores have been built, and iSuppli predicts that 5 billion a year will ship in 2011.

The common architecture supported on smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants and other handheld devices is ARMv4 . XScale and ARM926 processors are ARMv5TE , and are now more numerous in high-end devices than the StrongARM, ARM925T and ARM7TDMI based ARMv4 processors.

ARM cores

Design notes

To keep the design clean, simple and fast, it was hardwired without microcode, like the much simpler 8-bit 6502 processor used in prior Acorn microcomputers.

The ARM architecture includes the following RISC features:

  • Load/store architecture
  • No support for misaligned memory accesses (now supported in ARMv6 cores, with some exceptions related to load/store multiple word instructions)
  • Uniform 16 × 32-bit register file
  • Fixed instruction width of 32 bits to ease decoding and pipelining, at the cost of decreased code density. (Later, "Thumb mode" increased code density.)
  • Mostly single-cycle execution

To compensate for the simpler design, compared with contemporary processors like the Intel 80286 and Motorola 68020, some unique design features were used:

  • Conditional execution of most instructions, reducing branch overhead and compensating for the lack of a branch predictor
  • Arithmetic instructions alter condition codes only when desired
  • 32-bit barrel shifter which can be used without performance penalty with most arithmetic instructions and address calculations
  • Powerful indexed addressing modes
  • A link register for fast leaf function calls.
  • Simple, but fast, 2-priority-level interrupt subsystem with switched register banks

An interesting addition to the ARM design is the use of a 4-bit condition code on the front of every instruction, meaning that execution of every instruction is optionally conditional. Other CPU architectures typically only have condition codes on branch instructions.

This cuts down significantly on the encoding bits available for displacements in memory access instructions, but on the other hand it avoids branch instructions when generating code for small if statements. The standard example of this is the Euclidean algorithm:

In the C programming language, the loop is:

            
              while
            
            
              (
            
            i != j
            
              )
            
            
              {
            
            
              if
            
            
              (
            
            i > j
            
              )
            
            i -= j;
            
              else
            
            j -= i;
            
              }
            
          

In ARM assembly, the loop is:

            
              loop
            
            
              CMP
            
            Ri, Rj
            
              ; set condition "NE" if (i != j)
            
            
              ; "GT" if (i > j),
            
            
              ; or "LT" if (i < j)
            
            SUBGT Ri, Ri, Rj
            
              ; if "GT", i = i-j;
            
            SUBLT Rj, Rj, Ri
            
              ; if "LT", j = j-i;
            
            BNE
            
              loop
            
            
              ; if "NE", then loop
            
          

which avoids the branches around the then and else clauses.

Another unique feature of the instruction set is the ability to fold shifts and rotates into the "data processing" (arithmetic, logical, and register-register move) instructions, so that, for example, the C statement

could be rendered as a single word, single cycle instruction on the ARM.

This results in the typical ARM program being denser than expected with fewer memory accesses; thus the pipeline is used more efficiently. Even though the ARM runs at what many would consider to be low speeds, it nevertheless competes quite well with much more complex CPU designs.

The ARM processor also has some features rarely seen in other RISC architectures, such as PC-relative addressing (indeed, on the ARM the PC is one of its 16 registers) and pre- and post-increment addressing modes.

Another item of note is that the ARM has been around for a while, with the instruction set increasing somewhat over time. Some early ARM processors (prior to ARM7TDMI), for example, have no instruction to store a two-byte quantity, thus, strictly speaking, for them it's not possible to generate code that would behave the way one would expect for C objects of type "volatile short".

The ARM7 and earlier designs have a three stage pipeline; the stages being fetch, decode, and execute. Higher performance designs, such as the ARM9, have a five stage pipeline. Additional changes for higher performance include a faster adder, and more extensive branch prediction logic.

The architecture provides a non-intrusive way of extending the instruction set using "coprocessors" which can be addressed using MCR, MRC, MRRC and MCRR commands from software. The coprocessor space is divided logically into 16 coprocessors with numbers from 0 to 15, coprocessor 15 (cp15) being reserved for some typical control functions like managing the caches and MMU operation (on processors that have one).

In ARM based machines, peripheral devices are usually attached to the processor by mapping their physical registers into ARM memory space or into the coprocessor space or connecting to another device (a bus) which


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