The ARM reduced- instruction-set computing processor has evolved to offer a family of chips that range up to a full-blown multiprocessor. Embedded applications' demand for increasing levels of performance and the added efficiency of key new technologies have driven the ARM architecture's evolution. The ARM team has used the full range of computer architecture techniques for exploiting parallelism, including variable execution time, subword parallelism, DSP-like operations, thread-level parallelism and exception handling, and multiprocessing. The ARM architecture's developmental history shows how processors have used different types of parallelism over time. With its foundation in low-power design, the new ARM11 MPCore multiprocessor can bring low power to high-performance designs, which show the potential to truly change how people access technology.
