ARM

Arm Holdings (commonly known as Arm) was founded in 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines, a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology, and is headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Arm listed on NASDAQ under the ticker ARM in September 2023, in one of the largest technology IPOs of that year. SoftBank Group, which acquired Arm in 2016 for $32 billion, retained a majority stake following the IPO. Arm designs processor architectures and related intellectual property rather than manufacturing chips itself; its business model is built on licensing its instruction set architecture (ISA) and physical chip designs (cores) to semiconductor companies and device makers worldwide.

Arm's primary product is its processor IP: the Arm architecture (AArch64/AArch32, also known as the Armv8 and Armv9 instruction sets) and a library of licensable CPU, GPU, NPU, and interconnect designs sold under the Cortex and Mali families, among others. Arm licenses this IP in two main ways — architecture licenses, which allow companies to design their own custom cores compatible with the Arm ISA, and processor licenses, which let customers implement Arm's ready-made cores directly. Licensees include virtually every major semiconductor company: Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek, NVIDIA, and Amazon (for its Graviton server chips). The Arm architecture is the dominant ISA in mobile devices; virtually all smartphones shipped globally run on Arm-based chips. Arm earns revenue through upfront license fees and per-unit royalties on every chip shipped.

The Cortex-A series targets application processors (smartphones, laptops, servers). The Cortex-M series targets microcontrollers and embedded systems, and is the most widely deployed embedded processor family in the world by unit count. The Cortex-R series targets real-time applications. The Mali GPU IP family provides graphics processing for devices that license it. The newer Immortalis GPU family, launched in 2022, introduced hardware ray-tracing support for mobile. Arm's Neoverse platform, introduced in 2019, targets infrastructure and cloud server workloads and has seen significant adoption in AWS Graviton, Ampere Computing, and other data-center chips. In 2023 Arm introduced the Armv9 architecture, which added the Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) and the Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) as major technical additions.

Arm's principal architectural competitor in high-performance computing and servers is x86, represented by Intel and AMD. In the embedded and microcontroller space, RISC-V has emerged as an open alternative architecture, with companies such as SiFive and Andes Technology offering RISC-V cores. Arm's structural advantage is the scale of its existing software ecosystem: decades of toolchain support, operating system compatibility (Android, iOS, Linux, Windows on Arm), and the installed base of developers writing for Arm targets. In the server market, the Neoverse-based chips from AWS (Graviton3, Graviton4) have demonstrated competitive performance-per-watt against x86 counterparts, and Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have also deployed Arm-based server instances. The attempted acquisition of Arm by NVIDIA, announced in 2020 for $40 billion, was abandoned in 2022 following regulatory opposition from the US FTC, the UK CMA, the EU, and China.

Arm has maintained R&D operations in Israel, with a design center in Herzliya. The Israeli team has historically worked on processor micro-architecture and design verification. Arm has recruited from the Israeli semiconductor engineering community, which has deep expertise in CPU and SoC design, including engineers with backgrounds in Intel's Israeli design centers (which produced the Pentium MMX, Centrino, and Core microarchitectures) and in Marvell's Israeli operations.