Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, the RISC design joint venture of Acorn Computers Plc, Apple Computer Inc and VLSI Technology Inc, formed a year ago to develop and exploit the Acorn RISC Machine microprocessor design, has launched its first family of chips. It is offering the ARM6 application-specific integrated circuit macrocell, the ARM60 32-bit microprocessor implementation, and ARM600 application-specific standard product. The core technology for the family is the ARM6 macrocell, a 32-bit processor core designed for embedded control and portable equipment applications: it offers fully static operation, a high instruction throughput, low power consumption and real-time interrupt response, and is intended as a core for application and customer specific integrated circuits. Advantages of the technology, says Advanced RISC, include the highest ratio of processing power to power consumption of any 32-bit processor currently on the market – 14 MIPS average and 25 MIPS peak for 200mW, and the smallest die size – 11.3mm in VLSI’s one micron process technology. The ARM60 full-chip implementation has 32-bit address and data paths with 31 32-bit registers, arithmetic logic unit, multiplier and a barrel shifter. The processor can be configured in 26-bit mode for backward compatibility with earlier ARM2 and ARM3 processors. The ARM600 contains an ARM6 processor, 4K-byte cache, a write-buffer and a new memory management unit contributed by Apple to support small object-oriented systems. It also has a co-processor interface enabling it to work with dedicated co-processors such as a floating point accelerator. It is said to be ideal for embedded control and running advanced operating systems, including Unix and object-oriented systems, especially new generation of portable computing applications. Running at 20MHz, it is rated at 15 MIPS. Cross-development tools have also been launched for Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstations, with MS-DOS, Apple Mac and Acorn versions to follow. Availability of all the products is immediate. Aside from Acorn, current Advanced RISC users include Aleph One Ltd, CPUs; Cambridge University, communications; Computer Concepts Inc, laser printers; ICL Plc, disk sub-system research;, Micro Robotics Ltd, animatronics, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, laser printers; Perihelion Ltd, distributed operating systems; Radius Inc, graphics accelerators; Riska Inc, chess computers, Philips Kommunications Industrie, video-phones; and Sanyo Electric Co, for embedded office equipmeet controllers.
