Arm Ltd.

Arm Ltd. (stylized as arm) is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England. Its primary business is in the design of ARM processors (CPUs), although it also designs other chips; software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands; and systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. It is considered to be market dominant for processors in mobile phones (smartphones or otherwise), tablet computers and for chips in smart TVs and in total over 160 billion chips have been made for various devices based on designs from Arm (more than from any other company). The company is one of the best-known "Silicon Fen" companies. Since 2016, it has been owned by conglomerate SoftBank Group.
While ARM CPUs first appeared in the Acorn Archimedes, a desktop computer, today's systems include mostly embedded systems, including all types of phones. Systems, like iPhone and Android smartphones, frequently include many chips, from many different providers, that include one or more licensed Arm cores, in addition to those in the main Arm-based processor. Arm's core designs are also used in chips that support all the most common network-related technologies.
Processors based on designs licensed from Arm, or designed by licensees of one of the ARM instruction set architectures, are used in all classes of computing devices (including in space). Examples of use of those processors range from the world's smallest computer, to smartphones, laptops, desktops, servers and to the world's fastest supercomputer by several benchmarks included on the TOP500 list (and including at one point, in 2019, the most energy-efficient one on the list). Processors designed by Arm or by Arm licensees are used as microcontrollers in embedded systems, including real-time safety systems. Arm's Mali line of graphics processing units (GPU) is the third most popular GPU in mobile devices. A recent addition to their lineup are AI accelerator chips for neural network processing.
Arm's main CPU competitors in servers include IBM, Intel and AMD. Intel competed with Arm-based chips in mobile, but Arm no longer has any competition in that space (however, vendors of actual Arm-based chips compete within that space). Arm's main GPU competitors include mobile GPUs from American and Japanese technology companies Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), Qualcomm (Adreno), and increasingly Nvidia and Intel. Despite competing within GPUs, Qualcomm and Nvidia have combined their GPUs with Arm-licensed CPUs.
Arm had a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It also had a secondary listing on NASDAQ. However Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank Group made an agreed offer for Arm on 18 July 2016, subject to approval by Arm's shareholders, valuing the company at £24.3 billion. The transaction was completed on 5 September 2016.
On 13 September 2020, it was announced that Nvidia would buy Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion, subject to usual scrutiny, with the latter acquiring a 10% share in Nvidia.
History.
Name.
The acronym ARM was first used in 1983 and originally stood for "Acorn RISC Machine". Acorn Computers' first RISC processor was used in the original Acorn Archimedes and was one of the first RISC processors used in small computers. However, when the company was incorporated in 1990, what 'ARM' stood for changed to "Advanced RISC Machines", in light of the company's name "Advanced RISC Machines Ltd." and according to an interview with Steve Furber the name change was also at the behest of Apple, which did not wish to have the name of a former competitor namely Acorn in the name of the company. At the time of the IPO in 1998, the company name was changed to "ARM Holdings", often just called ARM like the processors.
On 1 August 2017, the styling and logo were changed. The logo is now all lowercase and other uses of 'ARM' are in sentence case ('Arm') except where the whole sentence is upper case, so, for instance, it became 'Arm Holdings', and since only Arm Ltd.
Founding.
The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology. The new company intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and had been selected by Apple for its Newton project. Its first profitable year was 1993. The company's Silicon Valley and Tokyo offices were opened in 1994. ARM invested in Palmchip Corporation in 1997 to provide system on chip platforms and to enter into the disk drive market. In 1998, the company changed its name from "Advanced RISC Machines Ltd" to "ARM Ltd". The company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998 and by February 1999, Apple's shareholding had fallen to 14.8%.
In 2010, ARM joined with IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ST-Ericsson (since dissolved) and Freescale Semiconductor (now NXP Semiconductors) in forming a non-profit open source engineering company, Linaro.
Acquisitions.
2018.
In July 2020, Arm announced plans to spin off Treasure Data, together with the other parts of its "IoT Services Group" business, into separate SoftBank-owned entities by the end of September 2020.
Changes of ownership.
Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank Group made an agreed offer for ARM on 18 July 2016, subject to approval by ARM's shareholders, valuing the company at £23.4 billion (US$32 billion). The transaction was completed on 5 September 2016.
American technology company Nvidia announced plans on 13 September 2020 to acquire ARM from SoftBank, pending regulatory approval, for a value of US$40 billion in stock and cash, which would be the largest semiconductor acquisition to date. SoftBank Group will acquire slightly less than a 10% stake in Nvidia, and ARM will maintain its headquarters in Cambridge. There is opposition to the deal, for several reasons, including national security. It is also being battled by Arm China.
Operations.
Business model.
Unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers, such as Intel, Freescale (the former semiconductor division of Motorola, now NXP Semiconductors) and Renesas (a former joint venture between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric), ARM only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP), rather than manufacturing and selling its own physical CPUs, GPUs, SoCs or microcontrollers. This model is similar to those of fellow British design houses ARC International and Imagination Technologies, which have similarly been designing and licensing GPUs, CPUs, and SoCs, along with supplying tooling and various design and support services to their licensees.
Facilities.
The company has offices and design centres across the world, including Cambridge, Bangor, Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield, Warwick in United Kingdom; San Jose, Austin, Chandler, Mountain View, San Diego, Waltham, Richardson and Bellevue in the United States; Vancouver in Canada; Bangalore and Noida in India; Copenhagen in Denmark; Oulu in Finland; Sophia Antipolis in France; Grasbrunn in Germany; Budapest in Hungary; Galway in Ireland; Ra'anana in Israel; Trondheim in Norway; Katowice in Poland; Sentjernej in Slovenia; Cape Town in South Africa; Lund in Sweden; Yokohama, Tokyo in Japan; Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, in China; Hsinchu, Taipei in Taiwan; Seoul in South Korea.
Technology.
A characteristic feature of Arm processors is their low electric power consumption, which makes them particularly suitable for use in portable devices. In fact, almost all modern mobile phones and personal digital assistants contain ARM CPUs, making them the most widely used 32-bit microprocessor family in the world. As of 2005, Arm processors accounted for over 75% of all 32-bit embedded CPUs.
Arm processors are used as the main CPU for most mobile phones, including those manufactured by Apple, HTC, Nokia, Xiaomi, Sony Ericsson and Samsung; many PDAs and handhelds, like the Apple iPod and iPad, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, 3DS and Switch, PlayStation Vita, Game Park GP32 and GamePark Holdings GP2X; as well as many other applications, including GPS navigation devices, digital cameras, digital televisions, network devices and storage. The WLAN processor of Sony's PlayStation Portable is an older ARM9.
Arm supercomputers.
The world's fastest supercomputer, the Japanese Fugaku, based on Arm AArch64 architecture and codesigned by Fujitsu (their extensions are now included in the Arm architecture), was in June 2020 "2.8 times as fast as IBM’s Summit, the nearest competitor. Fugaku also attained top spots in other rankings that test computers on different workloads, including Graph 500, HPL-AI, and HPCG. No previous supercomputer has ever led all four rankings at once." This is the first Arm-based computer to take the top TOP500 spot. , after an upgrade, it widened the lead to 3 times as fast. Fujitsu has several Arm-based supercomputers high-ranking in supercomputer benchmarks; in total 4 computers on the TOP500 list (plus some non-Arm based), and two of those make top-10 on Green500.
The supercomputer maker Cray has added "ARM Option" (i.e. CPU blade option, using Cavium ThunderX2) to their XC50 supercomputers, and Cray claims that ARM is "a third processor architecture for building next-generation supercomputers", for e.g. the US Department of Energy.
Fujitsu (the supercomputer maker of June 2011 world's fastest K computer according to TOP500) announced at the International Supercomputing Conference in June 2016 that its future exascale supercomputer will feature processors of its own design that implement the ARMv8 architecture, rather than the SPARC processors used in earlier supercomputers. These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with ARM Holdings. The Fujitsu supercomputer post-K planned, will use 512-bit scalable vector extension (ARMv8-A SVE) with "the goal of beginning full operations around 2021. [..] With post-K, Fujitsu and RIKEN aim to create the world's highest-performing supercomputer"; SVE is a new extension for ARMv8 allowing "implementation choices for vector lengths that scale from 128 to 2048 bits." Fujitsu has started production of this 52-core A64FX processor to replace the supercomputer, and each chip is about 2.5 times faster than their SPARC chips, "with double-precision floating-point performance of 2.7TFLOPS". A prototype supercomputer using the chip is on the TOP500 list as of November 2019, and is the most energy-efficient one on the list.
The Cray XC50-series supercomputer for the University of Bristol is called Isambard, named after Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The supercomputer is expected to feature around 160 nodes, each with two 32-core ThunderX2 processors running at 2.1 GHz. Peak theoretical performance of the 10,240 cores and 40,960 threads is 172 teraFLOPS.
The Vanguard project by Sandia National Laboratories is to deliver an exascale ARM machine. The first generation was called Hammer, it was based on X-Gene by Applied Micro. The second generation was called Sullivan was based Cavium's ThunderXs processors. The third generation of the Sandia National Laboratories' Vanguard project called Mayer was based on pre-production ThunderX2 and consisted of 47 nodes. The fourth generation also based on ThunderX2 is called Astra and was slated to become operational by November 2018. Each Astra node will feature two 28-core ThunderX2 processors running at 2.0 GHz with 128 GB DDR4. Each rack has 18x Hewlett Packard Enterprise Apollo 70 chassis with 72 compute nodes along with 3 InfiniBand switches. Astra will feature a total of 36 racks. Thus Astra will have 5,184 ThunderX2 processors, 145,152 ThunderX2 cores and 580,608 threads. Astra's peak theoretical performance is 4.644 PFLOPS in single-precision, and 2.322 PFLOPS in double-precision and will support 324 TB DDR4. Astra is the first ARM-based petascale supercomputer to enter the TOP500 list. , it is ranked at 156 after an upgrade (it started out ranked at 204 in November 2018).
Licensees.
Arm offers several microprocessor core designs that have been "publicly licensed" 830 times including 249 times for its newer "application processors" (non-microcontroller) used in such applications as smartphones and tablets. Three of those companies are known to have a licence for one of Arm's 64-bit Cortex-A72 (some including ARM's other 64-bit core the Cortex-A53) and four have a licence to their most powerful 32-bit core, the Cortex-A15.
Cores for ARMv8.2-A include the Cortex-A77, Cortex-A65AE, Cortex-A76, Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55. Cores for ARMv8-A include the Cortex-A73, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A32, Cortex-A35, Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53. ARM's client roadmap includes Hercules in 2020 and Matterhorn in 2021.
Cores for 32-bit architectures include Cortex-A32, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A12, Cortex-A17, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A5, and older "Classic ARM Processors", as well as variant architectures for microcontrollers that include these cores: Cortex-R7, Cortex R5, Cortex-R4, Cortex-M35P, Cortex-M33, Cortex-M23 Cortex-M7, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M0+, and Cortex-M0 for licensing.
Companies often license these designs from Arm to manufacture and integrate into their own "System on chip" (SoC) with other components such as GPUs (sometimes Arm's Mali) or modem/radio basebands (for mobile phones). Arm offers multiple licensing programs for their cores. Arm also offers Artisan POP IP, where Arm partners with foundries to provide physical implementation, which allows faster time to market.
In February 2016, Arm announced the Built on Arm Cortex Technology licence often shortened to Built on Cortex (BoC) licence. This licence allows companies to partner with Arm and make modifications to Arm Cortex designs. These design modifications will not be shared with other companies. These semi-custom core designs also have brand freedom, for example Kryo 280.
In addition to licences for their core designs and BoC licence, Arm offers an "architectural licence" for their instruction set architectures, allowing the licensees to design their own cores that implement one of those instruction sets. An Arm architectural licence is more costly than a regular Arm core licence, and also requires the necessary engineering power to design a CPU based on the instruction set.
CPU microarchitectures designed independently from Arm include:
Arm core licensees.
Companies that are current licensees of the 64-bit ARMv8-A core designs include AMD, AppliedMicro (X-Gene), Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Rockchip, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics.
Companies that are current or former licensees of 32-bit ARM core designs include AMD, Broadcom, Freescale (now NXP Semiconductors), Huawei (HiSilicon), IBM, Infineon Technologies (Infineon XMC 32-bit MCU families), Intel (older "ARM11 MPCore"), LG, Microsemi, NXP Semiconductors, Renesas, Rockchip, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments.
Arm architectural licensees.
In 2013, Arm stated that there are around 15 architectural licensees, but the full list is not yet public knowledge.
Companies with a 64-bit ARMv8-A architectural licence include Applied Micro, Broadcom, Cavium, Huawei (HiSilicon), Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Apple.
Companies with a 32-bit Arm architectural licence include Broadcom (ARMv7), Faraday Technology (ARMv4, ARMv5), Marvell Technology Group, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel, and Apple.
Built on Arm Cortex Technology licensees.
Companies that are current licensees of Built on ARM Cortex Technology include Qualcomm.
Mali licensees.
Companies that are current licensees of the Mali GPU designs include Rockchip, Allwinner, Samsung, Huawei, MediaTek, Spreadtrum and others.
Artisan POP IP.
Artisan POP IP partners include GlobalFoundries, Samsung, TSMC, UMC.
Arm Flexible Access.
On 16 July 2019, Arm announced Arm Flexible Access. Arm Flexible Access provides unlimited access to included Arm intellectual property (IP) for development. Per product licence fees are required once customers reaches foundry tapeout or prototyping.
75% of Arm's most recent IP over the last two years are included in Arm Flexible Access. As of October 2019:
Arm Neoverse infrastructure.
In October 2018, Arm rebranded their infrastructure portfolio under the Arm Neoverse brand and launched the Arm ServerReady certification program. The program is based on the Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) and Server Boot Base Requirements (SBBR) standards. Neoverse aims to scale from servers, WAN routers, gateways, cellular base stations and top-of-rack switches. Neoverse Platforms include Cosmos, Ares and in the future Zeus and Poseidon. The Cosmos Platform includes the Cortex-A72, Cortex-A73 and Cortex-A75. The Ares Platform includes the Neoverse N1 and Neoverse E1.
Companies using Neoverse Platforms include Amazon Web Services (Annapurna Labs), Ampere Computing, Marvell (Cavium), Huawei (HiSilicon), Qualcomm, Fujitsu, Xilinx, Mellanox, NXP.
Sales and market share.
Arm-based CPU market share in 2010: over 95% in smartphone market; 10% in mobile computers; 35% in digital TVs and set-top boxes; however, Arm did not have any market share in servers and desktop PCs. , Amazon Web Services is renting access to servers using their custom Arm-based chips (and 32-core desktop PCs are available). The first mobile phone to use an Arm processor was 1997's Nokia 6110 mobile phone.
In the fourth quarter of 2010, 1.8 billion chips based on an Arm design were manufactured. By 2014, over 50 billion chips with Arm cores inside had been produced, 10 billion of which were produced in 2013.
In May 2012, Dell announced the Copper platform, a server based on Marvell's Arm powered devices. In October 2012, Arm announced the first set of early licensees of the 64-bit-capable Cortex-A57 processor.
Arm's goal was to have, by 2015, ARM-based processors in more than half of all tablets, mini-notebooks and other mobile PCs sold.
With Microsoft's ARM-based OS, market research firm IHS predicted that, in 2015, 23% of all the PCs in the world will use ARM processors. This guess by IHS has since been proven wrong and desktop Windows for ARM didn't arrive until 2018. , over 160 billion chips with ARM IP have been shipped worldwide.
Uses of Arm technology.
Processors based on designs licensed from Arm, or designed by licensees of one of the ARM instruction set architectures, are used in all classes of computing devices (including in space). Examples of those processors range from the world's smallest computer to the processors in supercomputers on the TOP500 list, including the most energy-efficient one on the list. Processors designed by Arm or by Arm licensees are used as microcontrollers in embedded systems, including real-time safety systems (cars' ABS), biometrics systems (fingerprint sensor), smart TVs (e.g. Android TV), all modern smartwatches (such as Qualcomm Toq), and are used as general-purpose processors in smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops (even also for running, traditional x86, Microsoft Windows programs), servers and supercomputers/HPC, e.g. a CPU "option" in Cray's supercomputers.
In 2015, Arm's Mali line of graphics processing units (GPU) were used in over 70% of digital TVs and in over 50% of Android tablets by market share; some versions of Samsung's smartphones and smartwatches (Samsung Galaxy Gear) use Mali in addition to laptops. It is the third most popular GPU in mobile devices.
Systems, including iPhone smartphones, frequently include many chips, from many different providers, that include one or more licensed Arm cores, in addition to those in the main Arm-based processor. Arm's core designs are also used in chips that support many common network-related technologies in smartphones: Bluetooth, WiFi and broadband, in addition to corresponding equipment such as Bluetooth headsets, 802.11ac routers, and network providers' cellular LTE.
Partnerships.
University of Michigan.
In 2011, Arm renewed a five-year, US$5 million research partnership with University of Michigan, which extended their existing research partnership to 2015. This partnership would focus on ultra-low energy and sustainable computing.
, the "world's smallest computer", or computer device (made by University of Michigan team), is based on an ARM Cortex-M0+ core.
Arduino.
In October 2017, Arduino announced its partnership with ARM. The announcement said, in part, "ARM recognized independence as a core value of Arduino ... without any lock-in with the ARM architecture." Arduino intends to continue to work with all technology vendors and architectures.
Intel.
In October 2018, ARM Holdings partnered with Intel in order to share code for embedded systems through the Yocto Project.
Mbed OS.
On 20 October 2018, Arm unveiled Arm Mbed OS, an open source operating system for IoT. On 8 October 2019, Arm announced a new Partner Governance model for partners to collaborate on the future roadmap. Partners include: Analog Devices, Cypress, Maxim Integrated, Nuvoton, NXP, Renesas, Realtek, Samsung, Silicon Labs and u-blox.
Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC).
On 8 October 2019, Arm announced the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC) to collaborate and accelerate development of self-driving cars. Members include Arm, Toyota, Continental, Denso, Bosch, NXP, General Motors and Nvidia.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In August 2020, Arm signed a three-year agreement with DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, enabling DARPA researchers to use all of Arm’s commercially available technology.
Senior management.
Warren East was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Arm Holdings in October 2001. In the 2011 financial year, East received a total compensation of £1,187,500 from ARM, comprising a salary of £475,000 and a bonus of £712,500. East said in March 2013 that he would retire from Arm in May, with president Simon Segars taking over as CEO. In March 2014, former Rexam chairman Stuart Chambers succeeded John Buchanan as chairman. Chambers, a non-executive director of Tesco and former chief executive of Nippon Sheet Glass Group, had previously worked at Mars and Royal Dutch Shell.