Comment by hakfoo
5 days ago
I always wondered how ARM lost the plot there.
Considering the original ARM use case was a desktop-computer shaped thing with some degree of expandability, they had to solve the same problems that the PC did in bringup/enumeration/device abstraction. These should be solved problems.
At some point between Archimedes and iPhone, they lost this functionality. I assume there was a moment where they assumed that they were only doing SoCs with fixed peripherals and jettisoned all their knowledge and tooling in the space.
> ...lost the plot...
> ...jettisoned all their knowledge and tooling in the space.
ARM made a smart decision not to compete against Intel/AMD at the cutting edge, and instead completely dominated the low-power CPU market.
> These should be solved problems.
They are. The solutions have nothing to do with the ISA. The device discovery functionality you're talking about (ACPI/BIOS/etc) is provided by the motherboard, and (in the case of ACPI) made available to the OS by the bootloader. SoC's don't need sophisticated device discovery.