How Amateurs created the world’s most popular Processor (History of ARM Part 1) 

Reminds me of the Prescott Pentium 4s and Ds, there was a freaking 180w one if my memory isn't messed up, and that 220w "5GHz" AMD FX.

I have Pentium laptops from the 90s that run on passive cooling.

@@Kalvinjj The Intel 13900KS has a power limit of 320 W! Way higher than anything before! That’s how it hits 6 GHz on two cores and 5.6 on the remaining ones. Many other current Intel CPUs have a power limit of 250 W!

To be fair, there are modern processors that are much more powerful and consume even less power. They just aren't meant for "general purpose" computers in the modern sense. ARM1 consumed around 100mW at its 6MHz / 3MIPS, and that's just the CPU, while e.g. STM32L0 chips are more like 20mW at 32MHz / 30MIPS, which includes RAM, flash and some built-in peripherals, and can go as low as 0.2mW/MHz, over 100 times more energy-efficient than ARM1.

@@goekhanbag Holy meme 320W! That and the RTX 4090 melting plugs, care has been thrown out the window.

Amazing how many breakthroughs and discoveries are result of accidents and mistakes.

"Have you tried plugging it out and in again?" "It's not even plugged in" "Then how did it work in the first place?"

@@Felix-ve9hs It was truly one of the scariest moment!

@@Felix-ve9hs like the Senators asking Mark Zuckerberg "if Facebook is free, how does it make money?"

@@NathanHedglin zuckerberg: bee boo boo bop

Fun fact, this is a plot point for part 2 of this story!

epic

typhlosion

@@LowSpecGamer lmao

@@LowSpecGamer that’s pretty cool 😎

Character Development

I didn't even realize I was on LowSpecGamer's Channel! That's WILD!

That is a very interesting way to say he built his audience on one premise and then abandoned that so he can shill out his Nebula channel.

@@johndavis29209Don't be so negative man, this content is amazing and certainly not lazy. Not to mention that you can't strip games down like you used to. They don't make em like before.

Oh man you almost met the whole Character roster!

I know a gal who's really into BBC..

Ironically, the science park was founded by Sinclair.

What a delivery company that must have been everyone else gets a white van man or has to go pick it up personally from the shop and he gets it delivered by one of the boss men. We used to have a bbc at my last year of junior and it had the little robot drawing plug in thing that used to draw lines and other stuff but we weren't really allowed to use the bbc that often. A friend used to have an electron, maybe they got it because it was a little cheaper the bbc.

My father was asked to get a computer for a family member overseas around 1985 or 1986. I recall an Acorn computer (not sure what model, although it seemed really advanced for the time, compared to our own 1979 TI-99/4A computer) arriving our home, and our family (mainly my father and I) testing it out before it was taken/sent to our relative. I recall using a drawing/painting software to create a colour image of a house (which was quite simple compared to something you might create these days, although pretty good for an 8-year-old child at the time, I think), working diligently on it for a few hours into the late evening/night, before going to bed. I had fully expected my picture to be lost to our family before the computer was despatched to our relative, but the next day, I found that my parents had found a way of recording the image I had spent so long on on to a VHS video tape, which I was very grateful for!

As is tradition

And every pin contains at least 15 poisonous spiders.

@@IanZamojc Here comes the dude who doesn't know that Austria and Australia are different countries

@@khalvarius I _did_ originally misread it as "Australia" as I was writing it. I noticed at the last second, but decided to keep it since it's still funny for exactly the reason you mentioned.

@@IanZamojc as an australian it's also not poisonous spiders you have to worry about here, it's the venomous snakes but mainly the dropbears.

Custom applications can keep all the code and invariant data in ROM, and often have no need for an operating system, so it's not surprising that when reset, the application in the appliance is fully operational before your finger even leaves the reset button.

Well, the Acorn Archimedes Computers were expensive for a PC - but really good as a cheap unix station.

@@akulkisIt has an OS. It's just that the OS is in ROM.

@@Mechness You would be surprised how much can be done without an operating system

I haven't watched the video but as another Abigail, you're welcome!!

@@user9267 Yeah, but you were most likely born as an Abigail

​@@MasterChiefFloydAbigail P. Tube was born to be an Abigail, which is just as good if you ask me

The were amateur microprocessor designers. Mind you, if anything, this might've been an advantage, as they went in without some of the existing preconceptions that other more established designers were using. It didn't hurt that they also took a leaf out of Chuck Peddle's book, as the internal design of the 6502 and its ISA were major influences on those of the ARM.

@@talideon Still, amateurs strikes me as rarther clickbaity. I wonder if he said "amateur" to Furber's face in the interview.

@@talideon "Amateur microprocessor designers" is a false concept. They were all qualified to design microprocessors as much as anyone else in the world. They had cut their teeth before microprocessors were even widely available. When they decided to make ARM they had designed several computer architectures, their own sophisticated operating system, their own programming languages. Not only were they qualified to build ARM but they also chose to build custom hardware and software for the purpose of then designing ARM, because they correctly appraised everything available to be worse than their own prior work. They didn't go into the ARM project without preconceptions. They had very strong preconceptions. Firstly they had evaluated every microprocessor on the market using their tube system. Secondly, they were academics, and closely followed the latest computer science developments. They knew from watching the Berkley RISC project that a team of their size, budget and experience was more than enough to design such a CPU. It was already a settled question for years.

Thank you for your comment. I made a comment on this as a transfeminine with a background in IT about a month after Pride, and someone tried to dismiss her as "tomboys aren't transgender" I don't think I've ever facepalmed harder at such ignorance. Thank you for your contributions to the industry, I know Acorn's influence has been felt even on down to me as a humble repair technician.

So that's why the name felt different!

I met Sophie before she was Sophie. Ha! (True but meant humorously.)

@@awoovement 'Anything I don't like is ignorance.' 🙄 What's *actually* ignorant is the intentional ignorance of the facts of biology and mental illness that have inexplicably become trendy. XY != XX.

​@@awoovementI'm a transfem, and I love arm assembly. When I learned that ARM was made by a trans woman, it made sense

Thank you!

Same

obfuscation is both an asset and a great mistake

You can find solace in the fact that most programmers back then were just as average as you. We live with the ideas and solutions that survived the test of time.

​@@rumble1925 Also, what the OP misses: The systems at that time worked because they hadn't to consider much, only to not blow up the 32KB of RAM they had with garbage and to not have too heavy calculations running. And even if a program like Elite would fill up the whole memory of the computer - it would still be just some 40k lines of code overall - and that's for all the stuff happening. They say you get a bug every 1k lines of code and only 1% of them slip through. When you only have to look up 40k lines of code - you will find the bugs before delivery. When you have to look up 40m of code, you will not!

@@rumble1925 BS. Programmers were rather rare breed, and much more professional than now. Edsger Dijsktra said that appearance on personal computer brought programming 15 years back.

I still miss old style LowSpecGamer. I've been applying his tips since the GPU shortage and with the Steam Deck, in a way, they're more relavant than ever.

@helgakrobo : yep certainly to respect. Roger's/Sophie's voice is an octave lower in reality🙂 But a nice modest person.

Gotta have the mentally ill dude voiced by another mentally ill dude.

@@grewdpastor That makes sense, because it's a man.

I think what they meant in that context is a windows/Linux machine compatible with gaming and such.

@@aboveaveragebayleaf9216 So like the Apple M1/M2 type stuff?

@motocat5685 yeah, but with backwards compatability for titles made for x86 architecture.

My Archie died to battery leakage, now happily it sports a Pi3b+ inside running riscOS. Lovingly named the ArchiPi

@@aboveaveragebayleaf9216 so like the Apple M series? They wrote an x86 translation layer, so apps written for x86 can run on the ARM architecture. (They did the same thing for power pc to x86 back in the day too) and most apps ran as fast if not faster than on x86 too.

Especially ECD in the town of Delft was my "home shop" for a long time. I spend loads of time there, and bought a lot of utility ROMS. I still can remember I bought my first mouse I ever used in my life there. That was the AMX-mouse for the BBC-B. I also bought my Acorn Archimedes over there. Sadly that shop was closed down in the center and moved to outskirts of the town, to be shut down a few years later... Man - That where good times.

Wow!

Woops. How did that slip in the script? Thank you

@@LowSpecGamer Probably a simple mix-up considering that you have (A) Western Design Center and (B) Western Digital Corporation, which can both be abbreviated as /WDC/. UsuallY, though, the former is called WDC and the latter simply WD.

You compared and 8bit processor that has no modern facilities to modern dual core processor and are claiming that the latter was superior? Are you dumb?

To be frank, you compare a CPU with 133 Mhz (Raspberry Pico) with one that was running on 4 Mhz. And even if that's Pico not 100 times faster, you should remember that the OS will take around 1-2Mhz of your Z80, while it will only take around 10 Mhz of your Pico, so you have then 2 Mhz vs. 120 Mhz. It would be ashaming, if your Pico wouldn't perform 100 times faster than the Zilog Z80, especially as it's a 32 Bit controller = so it has to start shifting around bits for still being able to calculate the numbers much later than an 8 bit processor.

Yup, I have one, in my soldering iron. But I may have some in a washing machine or toaster I don't know about.

@@tomasprochazka6198For example, I have a CH32V003 MCU costing 10 cents.

@@tomasprochazka6198 I use CH32V003 in my simple projects. Brilliant price-performance ratio.

Fond memories of my electron

That could also describe this video

@@LowSpecGamer Well I meant something in form of comedic drama with human actors, and with the British quirks to it.

It also has a cameo from Sophie in it. She is the bar maid in a scene right at the end of Micro Men (I can’t remember if it is literally the last scene but it is definitely towards the end).

Micro Men is indeed a great movie and whilst not exact, it’s close enough. The story regarding the BBC coming to see the prototype is not entirely right, the biggest mod they had to make was the addition of mode 7 graphics which was teletext mode, other than that the Acorn Proton was pretty much on spec, but it’s remarkable that they got it demonstrated on time. The depiction of Clive Sinclair was good, he was a genius and did some remarkable things. After the BBC series of computers Acorn sold the Archimedes computer which was totally amazing at the time.. I know someone who bought an Archimedes just to play Elite..

@@andrewstones2921 Yes. Elite went solid rather than wire frame with Archimedes didn’t it? The original wire-frame Elite came out for the BBC Micro of course. Such an amazing game. Everyone looks for reasons why Acorn got into financial difficulties and needed the Olivetti bail-out in the mid 1980s. I would, almost but not entirely 100% jokingly, suggest that the productivity drain from Acorn developers all getting hooked on Elite might also be a very (very, very) small factor in Acorn’s demise. Elite addiction ripped through Cherry Hinton when it first came out.

Crosstalk and EM is a big part of why they're basically discouraged.

You must imagine this: The fact that we all have handheld devices nowadays in our hands is due to some nerds in Cambridge that wanted to show the former boss of their boss that they can do computers better. I wonder if we would without Acorn would be where we are now, because I don't think Intel would have been able to come up with a good processor architecture for small devices that is cost- and energyefficient and Motorola was already on their way out in the 1990s.

RISC-V seems more promising for the future. More free instructions sets will probably allow more research + things like Intel's x86 licensing or the fear of ARM acquisition won't be possibilities.

As some people already pointed out a single company owns ARM, so no i would not want that future

I like "The Change" with capital letters. I am going to start calling it that way.

Late 90s?

The main advantage of x86 is it's an insanely popular platform that is also relatively open. The mandatory IBM PC compatibility guarantees that every system will be able to boot any sort of OS you want and have some basic features like VGA/Vesa graphics and keyboard/mouse support etc.. To see a x86less world, all you have to do is take a peek on how things work on android. It's pretty dire.

@@dan_loup That's something that is rapidly changing because of Apple's push with ARM. As software (particularly device drivers) get ports for ARM, we'll see less and less issues with compatibility as time goes on. That said, you did remind me that we have a crap ton of legacy systems that companies and governments are unable to / too cheap to replace, and no one is going to start modernizing those. That alone is the only argument for keeping x86 around in the long run.

@@GyroCannon i mean, giving the control of the whole processing industry to a single company is probably a really bad idea...

@@GyroCannon The problem i'm pointing out is not compatibility, but control over your device. While the macs are actually quite open in terms of bootload etc at a point you can install linux on em, they only do it because they're having to compete with PC Compatibles. On the phone space where there's no PC, everyone does the bootstrapping and memory addressing etc the way they want, making basically impossible to make for example a linux distro that works on all phones.

I'm so excited about what it could come for ARM and what'll happen to x86 in the next years. I'm happy with my Ryzen, but still, having a Mac with a processor that looks like the one from a phone is as powerful (or even more) than my Ryzen 7 is insane. The next Mac Pro is a big question mark though. We'll see

I do MIPS and ARM (Cortex M) too, in assembler when necessary for the odd pinch point: my line of work is embedded DSP for RF systems. I agree that the relatively small number of registers on ARM can certainly become a bottleneck when you're trying to do an algorithm in-register to minimise load & store operations.

And yet when you look at the ARM64 instruction set, it's as though they saw the i86 and thought "hold my beer..."

The archimedes was doing true 3D well before other computers were capable of it

@@Underestimated37 Oh, there were Silicon Graphics workstations, and other brands, doing real-time 3D from the early 1980s. With custom hardware. At great cost. The Archimedes was able to manage it just on the CPU.

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 yeah I left out the words consumer computer

@@Underestimated37 There's true real time 3d on weaker hardware like the Amiga, ST. and even the ZX Spectrum. Granted, 8-bit 3d is usually more impressive than playable, and even ST/Amiga 3D is really compromised (No Second Prize is the limit of what you can get at a solid frame rate, though Hunter has its charms), but yeah, the Archimedes was the first western computer to make it a viable potential alternative to 2d. Still, it wouldn't be until the mid-90's that the potential was really realized, and you had the power to execute a 3d version of every 2d game. And it was still a questionable goal until the late 90's, early 2000's.

Hey! So am I..

I am watching this on a HAND device

Or really… how the Newton saved ARM from being forgotten before it ever really got on its feet.

That is all part 2

Big plot point on part 2!

They even got Abigail from PhilosophyTube to do Sophie's voice.

No idea why he called the amateurs in the first place.

And getting their best man into suicide just because he was gay.

Came out 2 hours ago give it time lol

@@pistachiodisguisey911 fair point

I guess it depends whether or not historical accuracy is important to you: I worked with a handful of Acorn employees in the early- to mid-80s. Personally, I did prefer the Micro Men portrayal of Wilson bearing in mind the timeframe under analysis both in that documentary and in this video. I assumed the choice here was to avoid unnecessary confusion later on when Steve Furber is interviewed, and his comments on Wilson. Early on in the video it was a significant discontinuity for me, but then I already had some knowledge. An individual's gender is actually irrelevant to the story itself, but I am sure that someone will find a way to use it to promote an agenda. The work both Furber and Wilson achieved on ARM creation and development is testament to their brilliance. For their achievements to be still so relevant today is testament to that. It is also especially gratifying considering the diminutive size of Acorn when this originally happened. Just my thoughts.

@@nezbrun872 that’s one reason I’d really like to know if the “man back then, woman since” way of speaking is personally preferred (or at least endorsed) by her or not. It’s a thing people can be very different about, I go back and forth on it for myself. I understand that there’s the element of “what did people say back then?”, and frankly the portrayal in Micro Men is clearly that of an “egg” (trans but unaware) anyway! (Plus there’s plenty of other embellishments in that production, so it’s a sliding scale really.) I also suspect they just didn’t want to take up valuable time (these videos being short) on what is as you say irrelevant to the rest. So this way is the safest option, for a few reasons, to just pick one name.

The questions I was making while writing the script were: “How do we portray her in a way that is respectful both to her and to trans viewers?” And a lot of thought went into implementing the video around those two questions. Our Artist came up with an androgynous design that I think worked well and I made sure she was referred by just last name on all in story dialog. It is a hard needle to thread, but we did our best. The original script of the video did had a bit more of a more direct cal to our decision of calling her by her name, but I removed it while editing because I did not want to derail the focus away from her absolutely incredible technical achievements which should be the center of this story. I hope it was the right call.

@@LowSpecGamer this is pretty much what I thought (indeed when I first saw her design that’s what really piqued my interest in how the voiceover would handle it); and I think you threaded the needle very well (especially given the runtime considerations)!

@@LowSpecGamer Everything told in the video happened before her gender change. It would have been simply accurate to show this person the way she was and was called back then, taking the focus away from the actual topic even less. It's not disrespectful to portray history the way it was. You are not revealing any private secrets.

1. It is generally considered in bad taste to deadname people, so we tried being tasteful on that. 2. This actually unclear. Some interviews point at the fruit machine as creating some of the ideas for the multiprocessor design, some point at Sophie coming with the idea along with the Tube connector. The exact genesis of the dual processor design is probably one of those ideas that came from many small elements. I would be interested if you have a source on BBC requiring the Z80 module because that I never read anywhere. 3. I know! Several other processors in fact. It was just not relevant to the ARM story. 4. Correct as far as I understand, but this video finishes at first prototype. What happened when they tried to commercialize is a topic for the next.

Agree. I'm frequently appalled by the re-writing of my experience. I'm an electronic engineer and was a VLSI Design engineer at TI Bedford (Warren East was a colleague on LAN team). I was a friend of Colin Watters and his wife - as you say, Not amateurs! I attended the launch of the Women in Science and Engineering campaign in 1984 with her and remained friends when she was at Arm and Colin still at Acorn. Hauser was never supportive of women engineers until he decided to champion Sophie as the UK top role model.

'is a horrible language with rules that make absolutely no sense,' This is true of all languages tbh.

Sorry but you don't deadname people, that is an asshole move.

@@BastetFurry defame? I don't think you understand the meaning of the word.

@@BastetFurry You don't blatantly lie. _That_ is an arsehole move.