Simon Segars: Arm DevSummit Keynote...and Sir Clive Sinclair

Earlier this week it was Arm DevSummit (the summit previously known as TechCon). As always, the opening keynote was by the CEO of Arm, Simon Segars. You can watch the keynote at the end of this post.

Simon's Journey and Clive Sinclair

Simon opened his keynote with a bit of personal history. He said he first got interested in computers when he was about 14 and started to put very simple programs on a Sinclair ZX81 in a local electronics store. He and his friend would go and play around with it until they got thrown out.

It was expensive. At £70 we weren't about to buy one. It was primitive by today's standards. It had a 3MHz 8-bit microprocessor and a whole one kilobyte of memory. But at that time, to me, it seemed like a box of magic.

The Sinclair in "Sinclair ZX81" was Sir Clive Sinclair. He passed away on 16th September just a few weeks ago, aged 81. If you are not as old as Simon (and me) then you may never have heard of the ZX81, and if you don't live in the UK, you might not know about Clive Sinclair. Prior to delivering the first consumer computers, he had sold calculators, electronic watches, and hi-fi components. And when I say components, I don't mean amplifiers and tape-decks. He delivered pre-amp boards, power amplifier boards, and so on. I actually built my first amplifier out of Sinclair components and it worked for many years until a friend of mine upgraded his amplifier and I bought his old amp off him.

Simon, in his keynote, said:

I want to take a moment to thank him for inspiring me, and a lot of other people at Arm who are roughly my age, with a desire to know more about how computers worked and how to code.

Simon wasn't the only person to have got their start on a Sinclair computer, and it was not just in Britain. For example, Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX...but you knew that) who presumably was still growing up in South Africa when he first got interested in programming:

RIP, Sir Sinclair. I loved that computer.

Or Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, presumably still growing up in India:

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair. Your innovations democratized computing and inspired so many, including myself. I vividly remember my first computer, a ZX80, and the sense of wonder and empowerment I felt. It was your device that sparked my passion for engineering

Also, many people in academic computer science departments cut their teeth on Sinclair machines. I'll put a Computerphile video at the end of this post since it gives a real sense of just how significant Sinclair was to making computers and programming accessible back in that era. The title of the video, Sir Clive Sinclair & British Computer Revolution, gives you some idea of how important he and his products were. The ZX81 was first released on 5th March 1981 (I missed the chance to write one of my "forty years ago today" posts earlier this year).

Simon went on:

I was interested in the hardware, and I would try and build basic circuits following the designs I found in magazines. Usually, if I'm honest, they didn't work, but I learned along the way. My interest in low power was born out of necessity. I didn't have a power supply so anything I built needed to run off a battery...just making some LEDs flash was success.

When the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) decided to have a series of programs on computer literacy and needed a machine to go along with that, there was a major competition for what would clearly be a lucrative contract. The main contenders were Sinclair and Acorn Computer. Sinclair clearly expected to win since he had working computers and Acorn did not. As you probably know, Acorn won the contract for what ended up being called the BBC Micro, and many years later Arm would be spun out of Acorn. The link between the two companies was Chris Curry, who worked for Sinclair for 14 years and then was a co-founder of Acorn. There is an excellent docudrama called Micro Men made in 2009 about this rivalry. You can read a bit more about it (and even watch the video) in my post Photography of Computers.

Back to Simon:

When I finally got my own computer, a BBC Micro, I was able to expand my programming capabilities, and also hook the computer up to external circuits via its expansion board...now I could make the LEDs flash with a program and I though that was really cool...having found my passion I went to university to get a degree in electronic engineering...that eventually bought me to Arm in a barn in the Cambridge countryside.

Simon said that one of the most exciting projects he worked on was being the lead for the ARM7TDMI. That number might not mean much to you if you were not in mobile back in the early 1990s, but it was the chip that made Arm the company. People forget, now that Arm is so successful, that its first products were all failures, with the Apple Newton being the highest-profile one (although, without Apple forcing Acorn to spin Arm out as a separate company, who knows where things would be today). You can read the history of Arm in my post Happy 25th Birthday, ARM. And you can read the story of the ARM7TDMI from when I managed to get an hour of Simon's time and blogged about it in The Design that Made ARM.

The rest of the keynote was less personal and more of an outlook of what is coming from Arm. If you want more details on any of these topics, watch the keynote at the end of this post.

• The Armv9 instruction set: "The foundation for the next decade of compute"
• Specialized processing: "Allowing increased differentiation"
• Security risks: The bad guys are "increasingly turning their attention t government agencies and critical national infrastructure"..."we have to do something about this"
• Confidential Compute: "shields both data and code from unauthorized access or modification while it's at rest and while it's in use"
• Decarbonizing Compute: "Low-power compute has long been part of our DNA"...and a guest appearance by CloudFlare's SVP of Infrastructure, Nitin Rao
• IoT: "more than 10B IoT devices in the world"
• AI (artificial intelligence): "The most important technology of the next 50 years...set to become the most impactful technology of our lifetime"
• Small devices: "Each month our licensees ship about a billion M-class devices...the first Arm Ethos devices are starting to ship"
• Arm + NVIDIA: "Arm's compute platform with NVIDIA's expertise in AI will result in AI becoming as pervasive as compute is today"

Simon wrapped up:

When I programmed that ZX81 roughly 40 years ago, it ignited a curiosity that eventually led me here to be talking to you all today. At Arm we envisage a future designed by millions of minds based on science and engineering, rooted in building a more secure and sustainable world for generations to come...together we can address the opportunities we have yet to discover.

Watch the Whole Keynote

Unlike most of Arm DevSummit, Simon's keynote is on YouTube and anyone can watch. Anyone, such as you. Simon's keynote proper starts at 4' 25" and ends at 27':

Sir Clive Sinclair & British Computer Revolution: Computerphile

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