As the most popular microprocessor architecture, tens of billions of dollars of equipment use chips based on the ARM architecture every year. According to a report by TomsHardware, ARM delivered a record 6.7 billion chips based on the ARM architecture in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone, which means it reached an astonishing rate of 842 chips per second. This means that ARM is more than all other CPU instruction set architectures (x86, ARC, Power and MIPS) on the market combined.
ARM's Cortex-A, Cortex-R, Cortex-M and Mali IP power thousands of processors, controllers, microcontrollers and graphics processing units from more than 1,600 companies worldwide. With the development of the world's digital trend, the demand for various types of chips has always been high. In view of the wide application of ARM architecture processors, it has also greatly promoted the development of ARM.
Although the media and users generally pay attention to ARM's Cortex-A series of general-purpose processor cores (because almost all mobile phones that people use daily are ARM architecture processors using this core), the most widely used core of ARM is Cortex-M Series, the products involved range from thermometers to microcontrollers in almost all places such as spacecraft. In the fourth quarter of 2020 alone, 4.4 billion low-power microcontrollers based on the Cortex-M core were sold.
In addition to the ARM and x86 processors that we often discuss daily, there are two types that users don't pay much attention to. They use more than x86 processors.
The annual shipment of Synopsys ARC processor IP is about 1.5 billion, but it basically won't attract media attention. Last year Synopsys launched a new DesignWare ARC HS5x and HS6x processor IP series for high-performance embedded applications, such as SSD master control, automotive chips, wireless baseband, network control chips, etc.
The other is MIPS. Since there is almost no development, there will be no chance of getting on the news. In daily life, various microcontrollers, consumer electronics SoCs, communication equipment and various low-power devices are still using MIPS-based processors.
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