Now that it has half a dozen partners, the Acorn Computer Group Plc affiliate Advanced RISC Machines Ltd plans three low-power microprocessors by the end of the year, plus a 16-bit subset of the standard 32-bit ARM RISC processor called Thumb, which is expected to deliver 20 MIPS at 33MHz, 30% better than the ARM7. Thumb is effectively a squeezing of the 32-bit ARM into 16 bits, says Electronic News. An ARM7T processor, due later this year, will come with a decompressor that expands 16-bit Thumb instructions into 32-bit ARM instructions. ARM8 will do between 50 MIPS and 80 MIPS.
