Sophie Wilson, ARM ArchArchitect

This is Sophie (R.) Wilson, a logic, software and ISA designer and erstwhile BBC-Micro and Acorn Archimedes heroine.

While looking back into ARM history the only surviving, thriving and competitive European processor architecture I got back to her, all of her deeds and feeds.

At least now she's got a little more than a stub in Wikipedia. Among other things she codesigned the first Acorn micro, wrote the BBC Basic, co-wrote the BBC Micro OS and did the ARM ISA (instruction set architecture), most of it in cooperation with colleague Steve Furber. From ARM came StrongArm and a host of processors, one of which is in every iPod and PSP f.e.. No small feat.

Read an interview at this Acorn 6502 kit site.

This Lady is in many ways in a league of her own and a follower in the footsteps of Lynn Conway. In terms of taking up challenges and following the opportunities of silicon and life. She also reminds me of Frances Holberton in terms of logical language design.

One paper on ARM history I found has it like this: Furber designed the architecture and Wilson the instruction set – the list of machine-code commands that the processor would understand. While Intel used mainframes to debug their CPU’s innards, Furber claims that Wilson did it all in her head. In creating a piece of technical wizardry with no resources that worked first time when plugged in, the two were in some ways merely repeating what they’d done with the BBC Micro.

Here is one more file armstory (text/rtf, 22 KB) (from the caches of google where they place the results of robbing limited access websites), 'f course we will not know where from and how long this URL will work, probably not too.

Ms. Wilson works for Broadcom now and her homepage is at sophie.org.uk.

She's still in the trade of processor designing and seems to have delivered yet another seminal processor design, named Firepath.

Ms. Wilson shares my love and admiration for the 6502 and its assembly language. Made me feel smart and good.

Longtime coworker Steve Furber has written a book on the ARM architecture, if you prefer books over surfing.

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