Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) Processor

ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machine. It is one of the most licensed and extensive processor cores in the world. In the year of 1978, first ARM processor was introduced by Cambridge University. The first ARM processor was produced by Acorn Group Of Computers in year 1985. ARM was founded and became very popular in 1990. In 2007, ARM processors were used in more than 98% of mobile phones and approximately 10 billion processors were shipped in 2008. ARM was the latest technology which was replaced by micro-controllers and microprocessors. In general, ARM is a 16-bit/32-bit processor or controller. In advanced digital products, ARM acts as a heart. 

Figure - ARM block diagram

These processors are specially used in portable devices like digital cameras, mobile phones, home network modules, wireless communication technologies, access control, communication gateways, medical Systems and in many other embedded systems. 
Some Advance Features of ARM Processor :

• In this designed processor there are only 25 basic instruction types.
• Through registers most of operations are implemented.
• Here every instruction has its own conditions with registers.
• This processor offers multiple modes of addressing.
• Manual stack manipulation is done here.
• Stack addressing and subroutines consist of explicitly programmed techniques.
• Because of 32 bits micro-processor, it is possible to have access to memory and data manipulation saved in these 32 bits.
• The address range of this processor is widely 26 bit.
• For direct access it allows 64 megabytes of memory.
• It consists of single cycle execution method.

ARM Applications:

Here mentioning some of the applications of ARM

1. Portable Media Players, Camcorders: Apple iPod Nano, original Zune 30 GB, Juice Box, Empeg Car, M6 Mini Player etc.
2. Mobile Phone, PDAs, Cameras: Nokia N93, Samsung Moment, Sony CLIÉ NX60, Canon PowerShot A470 etc.
3. GPS Navigation Systems: Tom Tom 300, Zarlink GPS receiver, Sun SPOT, Garmin Navigation Devices etc.
4. Portable Games Consoles: GameBoy Advance, 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Nintendo 3DS etc.
5. Set Top Boxes, TVs, Hard Discs, Routers: Asus Tinker Board, Zipit Wireless Messenger, Acorn Risc PC, Gumstix basix & connex etc.

Advantages of ARM Processor :

• They are cheaper as compared to other processors.
• It consumes less power.
• Better battery life than other processors.
• It works faster because it performs one operation at a time.
• Users choose ARM processors because of availability and applications support.

Disadvantages of ARM Processor :

• You can not run windows on it very soon because it is not binary compatible with x86.
• The speeds and memory bandwidths are limited in such cases because of ARM processor's clock frequencies.
• Debugging is difficult because of scheduling of instructions.
• The performance of these processors totally depend on execution so if programmer does not execute it properly then it can take a long time to work properly.