Where’s ARM4 and ARM5?
These were never made but ARM created a space for ARM4 and ARM5 in case they
wanted to go to simpler products. As the engineering transitioned from Acorn
to ARM Ltd., the number scheme for the processor was changed. As such the numbers
4 and 5 were skipped.
ARM’s First Chip
Although the ARM processor were developed as a cus- tom device for a highly
specific purpose, the team designing it felt that the best way to produce a
good custom solution was to produce a processor with good all-round performance.
However, it’s interesting to note
that the ARM’s architectural fate was sealed accidentally. While most
of the RISC processor vendors were designing relatively huge chips (SPARC RISC,
Intel i860, AMD 29000, etc.), ARM opted to develop a small-scale processor.
One of the reasons the ARM processor was designed as a small-scale solu- tion
was that the resources to design it were not sufficient to allow the cre- ation
of a large and complex device. While this is now a technical plus for the ARM
processor, it began as a necessity for a processor designed by a team of talented,
but inexperienced designers (outside of university projects, most team members
were programmers and board-level circuit designers) using new tools, some of
which were far from state-of-the-art.