A history of ARM, part 3: Coming full circle

Like many things in the ARM story, it started with Apple.

Steve Jobs triumphantly returned to the company he co-founded. The release of the colorful gumdrop iMac in 1998, the deal with Microsoft, and Apple’s sale of his ARM stake took the company from near bankruptcy to solid financial ground. But Apple’s “iCEO” was still looking for the next big thing.

Jobs equipped the iMac with a new connector called FireWire, which allowed for fast video and sound transfer. A file format called MP3 was becoming popular for computer users to share music on their computers, and companies had already started manufacturing portable MP3 players. But these devices had small storage capacities, slow USB 1.0 transfer speeds, and terrible software. Jobs fell in love with the idea of ​​creating a player and spent almost all of his time working on the project.

Apple partnered with a company called PortalPlayer, which developed its own player. The hardware used the PP5502, a custom ARM chip. It was a system-on-chip with dual ARM7 cores running at 90 MHz and 32 MB of onboard memory. The only other big chip on the motherboard was the FireWire controller. The flexibility of the ARM license made it easier to design CPUs with custom circuitry such as MP3 decoding.

How easy? An acquaintance, Dr. John Sims, told me about his other MP3 player company around the same time. It took just one engineer six months for him to add a digital signal processor (DSP) to his standard ARM design. Rather than partnering with ARM, a rival company that was building chips from scratch had 60 engineers and the project took him three times as long.

The iPod shipped in 2001, and after the Windows-compatible version was released, the little music player became the industry standard. At the device’s peak, over 50 million iPods were sold each year. People fell in love with its interface, its ease of use, and its iconic white headphones, but most people didn’t realize that his iPod was actually a tiny computer. It had a CPU, memory, a small hard drive, an operating system, and a touch wheel and buttons that were like little mice and keyboards. It even had a bitmap display for simple games.

Speaking of games, ARM’s second big win in 2001 was with Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance. It’s the successor to the original Game Boy and features a 16.8 MHz ARM7 core with built-in memory. It also had a Sharp LR35902 for compatibility with older systems. Even handheld game consoles were moving from CISC to RISC chips.