An in person and online presentation by Professor Stephen Furber

The ARM microprocessor dominates the world of mobile and embedded computing with over 200 billion ARM-powered microchips manufactured to date.

The origins of the ARM can be traced back to a small UK supplier of desk-top machines, Acorn Computers Ltd in the early 1980s, for whose staff the original ARM (then the ‘Acorn RISC Machine’) was a first attempt at designing a microprocessor.

A lot has changed over the subsequent 40 years, and today the ARM is used in almost all mobile phones, the world’s fastest supercomputer, and many other computing systems including the SpiNNaker brain-modelling computer at the University of Manchester.

This lecture is now available to watch in full on the Dickinson Memorial page.

About the Speaker

Professor Stephen Furber

Steve Furber is the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He received his B.A. degree in Mathematics in 1974 and his Ph.D. in Aerodynamics in 1980 from the University of Cambridge, England. From 1981 to 1990 he worked in the hardware development group within the R&D department at Acorn Computers Ltd, and was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, both of which earned Acorn Computers a Queen’s Award for Technology. Upon moving to the University of Manchester in 1990 he established the Amulet research group which has interests in asynchronous logic design and power-efficient computing, and which merged with the Parallel Architectures and Languages group in 2000 to form the Advanced Processor Technologies group. From 2003 to 2008 the APT group was supported by an EPSRC Portfolio Partnership Award.

Steve served as Head of the Department of Computer Science in the Victoria University of Manchester from 2001 up to the merger with UMIST in 2004.