Mobile Unleashed: a New Book About ARM

Mobile Unleashed is subtitled The Origin and Evolution of ARM Processors in Our Devices. It is by Don Dingee and Dan Nenni (my collaborator on our book Fabless). They even persuaded Sir Robin Saxby, ARM's founding CEO, to write the foreword. It is not just a history of ARM, there are plenty of those around (and if you want to see some incorrect dates, Wikipedia has plenty of them). Rather, it is a history of the key players in the ARM ecosystem, focused primarily on mobile, and so is the story of Nokia, Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, Mediatek, and more.

To whet your appetite, here are a couple of extracts from Sir Robin Saxby's foreword:

ARM, in one way, originated from a failure of mine. While at Motorola, I tried to sell the 68000 to Acorn for their next generation of personal computer. I failed, as did several others, and the result was Acorn taking that bold decision to design their own processor. The story of what happened to Acorn, to that processor, and to the company that eventually took ownership of it is well told in “Mobile Unleashed”.
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We have waited over two decades for someone to tell this story and reading this book reminds me of the sheer hard work that went into bringing it off. But it is also a tribute to the groundbreaking technology we designed, the group of incredibly talented people who made it happen, and the satisfaction of knowing that a small group in a barn just outside Cambridge dared to entertain a vision of becoming a world standard—and succeeded. I’'m delighted to have made my contribution. We worked together in teams across multiple companies from different backgrounds and cultures very effectively. Part of that success comes from an ability to be brutally honest with each other.

To find out more I called up Don Dingee last week, a task that was complicated in that he is in the middle of moving from Arizona to Texas.

He told me they didn't want to write the pure history of ARM, as that has been done several times. These books usually have two creation myths, that Acorn was the British Apple, and that ARM was created to build this mobile processor. Neither of these are true, although there is a grain of truth in both.

They wanted to cover the implications for the entire mobile industry. The book is in two parts. The first part goes from the origins of ARM up to Warren East as CEO and the announcement of the first Cortex. The story starts with the triumph of BBC Micro engineers Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, who made the audacious decision to design their own RISC microprocessor—and it worked the first time.

The second part starts with Steve Jobs returning to Apple and killing hundreds of projects such as Newton "I don't want a little scribble thing." (Of course, eventually there was the iPod and iPhone.) The book covers how Apple went from Mac culture to mobile. Qualcomm provided a great photo of the CDMA demonstrator that filled a white van. I actually remember seeing a similar van that contained the first GSM phone built entirely out of discrete parts on hundreds of boards at Racal in the UK.

Apple used ARM for mobile products from the beginning, but people forget that Qualcomm used Intel as a foundry (yes, the current Intel foundry is the third go-round or something) and x86 core of some sort. There is also the evolution story of how three companies—Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm—put ARM technology in the hands of billions of people through smartphones, tablets, music players, and more.

Early photographs of Simon Segars, ARM's current CEO, are rare. But click on this recent photo of him at ARM TechCon to see how he looked in 1997 in a photo Don managed to track down for the book.

The book is available in paperback or kindle formats from Amazon (currently $19.95 in paperback and $15 for Kindle). I have a copy on its way in the mail, I'll review it once I've read it.