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
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.
Why it matters
Arm’s licensing model spread one CPU architecture across nearly the entire mobile and embedded world. 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 phones in your pocket.
Sources
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Arm Holdings — Wikipedia, for the company’s history and business model. ↩
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Arm — the company’s official site, for its architecture and licensing. ↩