Thumb: reducing the cost of 32-bit RISC performance in portable and consumer applications
L. Goudge, S. Segars · 2002
This article discusses a RISC architectural innovation from ARM known as Thumb. High-end embedded control applications such as cellphones, disk drives and modems are demanding more performance from their controllers while still requiring low cost. By implementing a second "compressed" instruction set, Thumb reduces RISC code size and so provides 32-bit ARM RISC performance and power consumption at 8/16-bit system cost.