Mobile Unleashed: The Origin and Evolution of ARM Processors in our Devices

by Daniel Nenni, Don Dingee, Robin Saxby (Foreword)

This is the origin story of technology super the creators and founders of ARM, the company that is responsible for the processors found inside 95% of the world’s mobile devices today. This is also the evolution story of how three companies – Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm – put ARM technology in the hands of billions of people through smartphones, tablets, music players, and more.It was anything but a straight line from idea to success for ARM. The story starts with the triumph of BBC Micro engineers Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, who make the audacious decision to design their own microprocessor – and it works the first time. The question becomes, how to sell it? Part I follows ARM as its founders launch their own company, select a new leader, a new strategy, and find themselves partnered with Apple, TI, Nokia, and other companies just as digital technology starts to unleash mobile devices. ARM grows rapidly, even as other semiconductor firms struggle in the dot com meltdown, and establishes itself as a standard for embedded RISC processors.Apple aficionados will find the opening of Part II of interest the moment Steve Jobs returns and changes the direction toward fulfilling consumer dreams. Samsung devotees will see how that firm evolved from its earliest days in consumer electronics and semiconductors through a philosophical shift to innovation. Qualcomm followers will learn much of their history as it plays out from satellite communications to development of a mobile phone standard and emergence as a leading fabless semiconductor company.If ARM could be summarized in one word, it would be “collaboration.” Throughout this story, from Foreword to Epilogue, efforts to develop an ecosystem are highlighted. Familiar names such as Google, Intel, Mediatek, Microsoft, Motorola, TSMC, and others are interwoven throughout. The evolution of ARM’s first 25 years as a company wraps up with a shift to its next the Internet of Things, the ultimate connector for people and devices.Research for this story is extensive, simplifying a complex mobile industry timeline and uncovering critical points where ARM and other companies made fateful and sometimes surprising decisions. Rare photos, summary diagrams and tables, and unique perspectives from insiders add insight to this important telling of technology history.

Genres: Business, Technology, Nonfiction

323 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 21, 2015

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written as a long tech article rather than an in-depth book on the company - this was a disappointment and a missed opportunity.

There is little depth here, it lists lots of phone models and sizes, chip names, all of which you can go to wikipedia if you were that interested. It also jumps around, from starting out covering Arm (which was interesting) to covering Samsung and Qualcomm and others. These other company backgrounds are interesting, but there is no flow for the reader, the book needed a consistent progressing timeline throughout.

They are no interviews with people involved, this is mostly a coverage of public news articles, so we know what happens, but not why. There are many good books on Intel, Commodore, Blackberry etc which really do take you on the journey of a company and the tech industry at the time, and this is not one of those books.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book as I'm always interested in where things come from & the teams who design them. Microprocessors are one such interest. I studied CPU design in college but never got into that side of the computer business (software had a lot more opportunities). But I like the stories. _Microprocessor: A Biography_ is 25 years old, but does tell the story of CPUs up to the mid-1990's. ARM is the current darling of CPU design, due to their extreme efficiencies. They are not an overnight success, but the outcome of years of design work.

THe book is interesting in the beginning, discussing where the team comes from and their first product. I didn't realize Olivetti had control over ARM at one point. That is a good example of willfull blinders, as they wanted PC compatible, not cutting edge design.

There are good tidbits around the first chips. The EMF off of the fan provided enough current to keep the chip from shutting down. Nothing says super efficient when the leakage found inside a desktop computer of the age can run the CPU.

After awhile, the book becomes nothing more than repeating chip designations and instruction set updates. The thread of the teams and their decisions becomes lost. It picks up a bit more in chapters around Apple, but outside of the Apple entries, it returns to being muddled.

I wanted more about the design decisions that went into each iteration. Why did the teams take the cores in a certain direction?

It is a good primer for the people involved in the original ARM designs. But it could use a lot more interviews with the people involved to pull out how such a group built an amazing set of CPU cores.

[Brian King · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming from a non-hardware background, it was often difficult to to cut through some of the jargon and to understand which innovations were truly meaningful. Parts of the book read as basically alphabet soup, listing a dizzying blur of companies followed by the innumerable chip/SoC models they produced over time.

That being said, I thought the sections on the origins of Qualcomm and Samsung were quite interesting and flowed well. It was also amazing to see how well the final chapters have stood up in terms of peering into the future of the company. Almost a decade later, Arm is focusing on exactly the areas discussed: IoT/embedded, automotive, cloud/datacenter/infrastructure, and of course mobile.

[Tang Jie · Rating 5 out of 5]

semiwiki.com的创始人的作品，而且很大方地在网站上提供了下载。因此，可能是这个原因，国内并没有引进。连豆瓣上都没有。

一句话，这个是arm的编年史，因为是2015年的作品，还没有包含孙正义的收购。但是作者很睿智地指出，arm的未来不再mobile，而在embedded。但是，同样，因为没有看到RISC-V的出现。

不算是大部头，从最早的bbcmicro开始，到和apple的牛顿pda的合作，然后到mobile的兴起, 在apple的iphone出现之前，arm已经是mobile的核心了。这个可能和他的商业模式关系密切。

powerpc那边的68k命运不济，sgi的mips则是没法缩小身价。还有dec的alpha，也是悲伤的故事。原来Intel的strong arm就是alpha那帮人的作品。risc兴起的原因是高性能的工作站，因此要他们做mobile的确很难。

智能手机市场演绎了太多故事。微软起了大早，没赶上集。apple的iphone的强势崛起，rim的后知后觉，Nokia的着火的平台，moto的衰老，索爱的小众

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was interested in reading this book for the tech history of the ARM (RISC) processors - what makes them better, faster, lower energy and how they evolved. In that regard it was a bit of a disappointment. There was some tech but mostly it was a business level or at best tech 101 discussion with alphanumerics thrown around without definition. The emphasis was who bought whom and when.

[Alex Pearson · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the material was interesting, I thought the presentation and organization of the material was poor.