Field Guide · organization

Also known as: Arm, ARM Ltd, Advanced RISC Machines

Arm Holdings is a British company that designs the Arm processor architecture and licenses it to other chipmakers rather than manufacturing chips itself.1

Arm designs IP / Cortex cores SoC vendors Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung foundry TSMC fabricates licenses makes silicon Arm never builds a chip — it sells the design that everyone else builds around
Arm's pure-IP model: it designs the architecture and Cortex cores, licenses them to SoC vendors like Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung, who in turn have foundries such as TSMC fabricate the silicon.

Overview

Arm grew out of Acorn Computers, where the original ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) design was created in the 1980s by a team including Sophie Wilson. The company spun out in 1990 and adopted a pure licensing model: it sells the right to use its architecture and its ready-made Cortex core designs, and partners such as Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung build the actual silicon.2

Because Arm cores are energy-efficient, they dominate battery-powered devices. The vast majority of smartphones, tablets, and microcontrollers — and a growing share of laptops and servers — run Arm-based processors.

Two ways to license

Arm’s business rests on two kinds of licence, which suit very different customers:

Licence type What the customer gets
Core licence A ready-made Cortex design to drop into a chip
Architecture licence The right to design a custom core (e.g. Apple’s) that runs Arm code

Where it fits

Arm’s licensing model spread one CPU architecture across nearly the entire mobile and embedded world, and its main open-standard rival is now the royalty-free RISC-V. The single-board computers and microcontrollers used as GopherTrunk capture nodes — Raspberry Pis and many MCU boards — are built around Arm cores, so the same instruction set runs from the antenna node up to the phones in your pocket.

Sources

  1. Arm Holdings — Wikipedia, for the company’s history and business model. ↩

  2. Arm — the company’s official site, for its architecture and licensing. ↩

See also