It’s very easy to become wound up with hype over a technically hot product such as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd’s ARM RISC, but with the new agreement with Samsung Electronics Co and the one between IBM Corp and ARM licensee VLSI Technology Inc suggest that the Cambridge company’s RISC will turn out to be a much bigger British chip success than the ill-fated Transputer: crucial to the success – the company is already profitable, is the fact that it is following the current fashion of chip start-ups for concentrating on design and leaving others to bear the cost of fabrication; the ARM6 and ARM7 are RISC cores, the ARM610 is a RISC microprocessor with 32-bit data bus and 32-bit address bus, on-chip memory management unit, a 4Kb mixed cache and a write buffer; Samsung says it will begin sampling its first product using the ARM RISC processor core in 1995 and plans to develop and produce a variety of digital convergence consumer products based on the technology, including a personal digital assistant; VLSI is developing and fabricating Serial Storage Architecture interface driver chips using the ARM core, to be available for purchase and use by IBM in future storage products.
