I never used it, but the first UNIX port for ARM was called RISC iX and it was introduced in 1988.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX
In retrospect, if Sun had acquired Acorn, they might still be around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX
In retrospect, if Sun had acquired Acorn, they might still be around.
It's popular now to imagine that ARM had some magic ISA back in the 80's, but it was very much an also-ran through most of its life. The magic is inside Apple Computer, and quite frankly they could have made anything fast. They simply happened to have an ARM OS core running already, so they picked the architecture that wouldn't force people to recompile their iPhone apps.
Why would DEC indulge in an also-ran? Ken Olsen's folly? Or is 1996 far too late?
> The StrongARM was designed to address the upper end of the low-power embedded market, where users needed more performance than the ARM could deliver while being able to accept more external support. Targets were devices such as newer personal digital assistants and set-top boxes.
They'd be able to power a faster PalmPilot or proto-TiVo with it but this was years before the mobile design advances, let alone battery and screen improvements, that led to the iPhone.
Do I need to? StrongARM is pretty much the definition of an "also-ran" product, no? It had no particularly notable design wins, and while it sold in reasonable volume was a distant second to MIPS in the "consumer junk" segment[1]. DEC unloaded it to Intel, where it becamse Xscale, and Intel dumped it on Marvell. At no point did anyone really care much about it.
Even within the ARM world itself, it was ARM Ltd's CPU cores (also Qualcomm had some decent designs) that powered the architecture's way back to relevance on phones, out of which Apple would grow to dominate.
[1] Set top boxes, cable modems, stuff like that.
However, the idea that somehow it (or any of it's contemporary ARM kin) could somehow 'replace SPARC and save Sun Microsystems'...well, that's just laugh out loud silly.
I thought all the uncritical ARM fanbois had defected to RISC-V. Good to see some still carrying the torch.
Sun ownership would not have guaranteed survival, as management did many foolish things, but it would have upped the odds.
Off the top of my head:
* Two duplicate "high-end" VAX architectures (VAX 8000 vs VAX 9000), because no one wanted to choose between CMOS and ECL
* Three duplicate systems targeted at the high-end (Alpha, VAX 9000, VAX 8000)
* Two duplicate RISC+UNIX systems, because DEC was extremely late to market (MIPS 3000/5000 series vs Alpha)
* Two duplicate UNIX software packages, because DEC was really late to market (1970s ULTRIX ported to MIPS, OSF/1 on Alpha, and the never-fucking-released OSF/1 on MIPS because DEC just could not get their shit together)
* Four duplicate low end systems (MIPS, PDP-11, NVAX, Alpha were all sold simultaneously at the same price point!)
* A dozen utterly-failed microcomputer projects (Pro/3xx, Rainbow, etc)
DEC was not a particularly well-managed company. Their approach, for decades, was "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks." This worked fine right up until it didn't work at all.
It is also worth noting that Alpha, the "good" DEC initiative, was a failure. It lost a lot of money! market share never got out of the single digits.
[1] And then promptly imploded, and has been forgotten now even by people[2] living and working every day in the environment Sun created. That's the bit I was pointing out upthread.
[2] Who apparently think that the important story of that era is somehow the emergence of ARM?!