Arm

Arm began in 1985 as the Acorn RISC Machine, a processor designed by a small team for a British home computer. The business model is what made it ubiquitous: Arm licenses the architecture and core designs, and everyone else builds the chips. arm64 — AArch64, introduced with ARMv8 in 2011 — is the 64-bit architecture, and it runs everything from single-board computers to Apple silicon to cloud servers.

For lab work the recurring friction is not the hardware but the software: container images and prebuilt binaries that only ship for x86-64. That gap is exactly why arm64 build machines earn their keep — software that claims to be portable gets to prove it here.

In this family

• arm64 — AArch64, the 64-bit architecture. The 32-bit lines (ARMv7 and earlier) preceded it and remain common in microcontrollers.

In the lab

• Apple Mac mini workstation · in use Models from 2011 through 2020, Intel through Apple silicon.
• Raspberry Pi sbc · in use An assortment spanning several generations.
• Traverse Ten64 appliance · in use An eight-core arm64 network board built around the NXP Layerscape LS1088A.