Formerly |
|
---|---|
Company type | Public subsidiary |
| |
Industry | Semiconductors |
Founded | 27 November 1990 [1] |
Founders | Jamie Urquhart, Mike Muller, Tudor Brown, Lee Smith, John Biggs, Harry Oldham, Dave Howard, Pete Harrod, Harry Meekings, Al Thomas, Andy Merritt, David Seal [2] |
Headquarters | Cambridge, England, UK |
Key people | |
Products | Microprocessor designs, graphics processing unit (GPU) designs and neural processing unit (NPU) designs [3] |
Revenue | US$3.23 billion (2024) |
US$111 million (2024) | |
US$306 million (2024) | |
Total assets | US$7.93 billion (2024) |
Total equity | US$5.29 billion (2024) |
Number of employees | 7,096 (2024) [4] |
Parent | SoftBank Group (88%) [4] |
Website | arm.com |
Footnotes /references Financials as of 31 March 2024 [update] . [5] |
Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
While ARM CPUs first appeared in the Acorn Archimedes, a desktop computer, today's systems include mostly embedded systems, including ARM CPUs used in virtually all modern smartphones. 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. Arm has two lines of graphics processing units (GPUs), Mali, and the newer Immortalis (which includes hardware-based ray-tracing). [6]
Arm's main CPU competitors in servers include IBM, Intel and AMD. [7] 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 technology companies Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), Qualcomm (Adreno), and increasingly Nvidia, AMD, Samsung and Intel. While competing in GPUs, Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia all have combined their GPUs with Arm-licensed CPUs.
Arm had a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It also had a secondary listing of American depositary receipts on New York's Nasdaq. However Japanese multinational conglomerate 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. [8] [9] The transaction was completed on 5 September 2016. [10] [11] A planned takeover deal by Nvidia, announced in 2020, collapsed in February 2022, [12] with SoftBank subsequently deciding to pursue an initial public offering on the Nasdaq in 2023, valuing Arm at US$54.5 billion. [13]
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." According to Steve Furber the name was changed at the behest of Apple, which did not wish to have the name of a competitor in the name of the company. At the time of the IPO in 1998, the company name was changed to "ARM Holdings", [14] often just called ARM like the processors. [15]
On 1 August 2017, the styling and logo were changed. The logo is now all lowercase ('arm') and other uses of the name are in sentence case ('Arm'). [15] [16]
The company was founded on 5 November 1990 as Widelogic Limited but this was rapidly changed, on 3 December 1990, to Advanced RISC Machines Limited and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology. Acorn provided 12 employees, VLSI provided tools, Apple provided a US$3 million investment (equivalent to $7 million in 2023). [17] [18] Larry Tesler, Apple VP was a key person and he helped recruit the first CEO at the joint venture, Robin Saxby. [19] [20] 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. [21] [22] In 1998, the company changed its name from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd to ARM Ltd. [23] The company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Nasdaq in 1998 [24] and by February 1999, Apple's shareholding had fallen to 14.8%. [25]
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. [26]
Japanese conglomerate 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). [8] [58] The transaction was completed on 5 September 2016. [10] [59]
In 2017, a 25% stake of Arm was transferred to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which received investment from the Saudi sovereign fund. [60]
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 have been the largest semiconductor acquisition to that date. SoftBank Group would acquire slightly less than a 10% stake in Nvidia, and ARM would maintain its headquarters in Cambridge. [61] [62] [63] [64] There was opposition to the deal, including national security concerns from the UK and competition concerns from fellow tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm, whose chips in use or on sale heavily rely on Arm's intellectual property. [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] It was also being battled by Arm China, its subsidiary, [70] a majority stake of which was held by Chinese investors. [71] [72] The acquisition was initially scheduled to conclude before the end of 2022 per the contract. [73] However, the European Commission, the UK Competition and Markets Authority and the US Federal Trade Commission raised completion concerns focusing on Arm's role within Nvidia, while the UK government also raised concerns about national security. The merger attempt was eventually cancelled in February 2022 [74] due to the aforementioned regulatory pressure and hurdles. [75] [76]
Arm filed for an IPO on 21 August 2023 on the Nasdaq, rather than the LSE. [77] [78] A few days earlier, SoftBank Group bought back the 25% stake from Vision Fund for around $16 billion, valuing Arm at over $64 billion. [79] Arm went public on 14 September 2023 raising $4.87 billion at a $54.5 billion valuation, with SoftBank continuing to own roughly 90% of the company following the offering. [80] [81] [82]
SoftBank Group sold more than half of Arm China in 2018 to a local consortium consisting of various parties including China Investment Corp. and the Silk Road Fund, effectively relinquishing majority ownership of its Chinese subsidiary to a group of investors with ties to the Chinese state. From 2020, a discord between Arm and the effective owners of Arm China became visible after the British parent company unsuccessfully tried to oust the chief executive of the subsidiary, who, however, managed to retain his position. [83] [84] A prevailing view emerged that the matter would negatively affect the pending approval by the Chinese regulators of the Softbank-Nvidia deal, as well as any public offering of Arm. [85] [86]
In September 2021, despite Arm's denial, reports stated that the chief executive of Arm China, whom the British parent had tried to dismiss, had publicly declared the "independence" of Arm China. [70] [87] In February 2022, Allen Wu, the CEO of Arm China, floated the idea of a public offering of the Chinese subsidiary in 2025. [88]
On 29 April 2022, it was reported that the CEO and legal representative of Arm China had finally been replaced according to legally recognized filings. However, Allen Wu continued to dispute this. [89] Subsequently, in 2023, key staff left to form their own chip design startup Borui Jingxin, which competes with Arm China, particularly for engineers. [90] [91]
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), [92] 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. [93]
A characteristic feature of Arm processors is their low electric power consumption, which makes them particularly suitable for use in portable devices. [94]
Arm processors are used as the main CPU for most mobile phones [95] many PDAs and handhelds, like the Apple iPod and iPad, [96] [97] and computer games and as well as many other applications, including GPS navigation devices, digital cameras and televisions. [98]
The world's second fastest supercomputer (previously fastest) in 2022, [99] the Japanese Fugaku is based on Arm AArch64 architecture. [100]
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 clients such as the United States Department of Energy. [101]
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. [102]
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. [103]
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. The fourth generation also based on ThunderX2 is called Astra and was slated to become operational by November 2018. [104]
ARM968E-S was used to build the neuromorphic supercomputer, SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture). [105]
Arm has four lines of central processing units (CPUs)/processors: [106]
It also has two lines of graphics processing units (GPUs): Mali, and the newer Immortalis (with hardware-based ray-tracing). In addition, it offers Ethos neural processing units (NPUs), Corelink/CoreSight System/SoC IP, and TrustZone/CryptoCell/SecurCore Security IP. [106]
Arm offers several microprocessor core designs that have been "publicly licensed" for its newer "application processors" (non-microcontroller) used in such applications as smartphones and tablets. [107]
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. [108] [109]
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. [110]
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. [111] Arm also offers Artisan POP IP, where Arm partners with foundries to provide physical implementation, which allows faster time to market. [112]
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. [113]
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. [114]
The Financial Times reported in March 2023 that Arm had planned to charge the licensees royalties based on the value of the device, instead of the prior model based on the chip's value. [115]
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 [116] [117] ). Processors designed by Arm or by Arm licensees are used as microcontrollers in embedded systems, including real-time safety systems (cars' ABS), [118] biometrics systems (fingerprint sensor [119] ), 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 for running traditional x86 Microsoft Windows programs [120] [121] ), [122] servers [123] and supercomputers/HPC, [124] [125] [126] [101]
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. [127] Arm's core designs are also used in chips that support many common network-related technologies in smartphones: Bluetooth, WiFi and broadband, [128] in addition to corresponding equipment such as Bluetooth headsets, [129] 802.11ac routers, [130] and network providers' cellular LTE. [131]
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. [132] [133]
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. [134]
In October 2018, ARM Holdings partnered with Intel in order to share code for embedded systems through the Yocto Project. [135] On 12 April 2023, ARM Holdings partnered with Intel Foundry Services to bring Arm SoCs to Intel's 18A process. [136]
On 20 October 2018, Arm unveiled Arm Mbed OS, an open source operating system for IoT. [137] 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. [138] In November 2020, Arm spun out the entire IoT software division as Pelion, a separate but wholly owned subsidiary of Arm. [139] In October 2022 the IoT services of Pelion were purchased by Izuma Networks, an Austin, Texas based startup. [140]
On 8 October 2019, Arm announced the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC) to collaborate and accelerate development of self-driving cars. Members include Arm, Bosch, Continental, Denso, General Motors, Nvidia, NXP and Toyota. [141]
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. [142]
In October 2001, Warren East was appointed chief executive officer (CEO) of Arm Holdings. 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. [143] [144] [145]
In May 2013, president Simon Segars took over as CEO. [146] [147]
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. [148]
On 8 February 2022, Rene Haas succeeded Segars as CEO with immediate effect, with Segars leaving Arm. [149]
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that designs and develops central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), system-on-chip (SoC), and high-performance compute solutions. AMD serves a wide range of business and consumer markets, including gaming, data centers, artificial intelligence (AI), and embedded systems.
Nvidia Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for mobile computing and the automotive market. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software.
ARM is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the ISAs and licenses them to other companies, who build the physical devices that use the instruction set. It also designs and licenses cores that implement these ISAs.
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
XScale is a microarchitecture for central processing units initially designed by Intel implementing the ARM architecture instruction set. XScale comprises several distinct families: IXP, IXC, IOP, PXA and CE, with some later models designed as system-on-a-chip (SoC). Intel sold the PXA family to Marvell Technology Group in June 2006. Marvell then extended the brand to include processors with other microarchitectures, like Arm's Cortex.
In computing, especially digital signal processing, the multiply–accumulate (MAC) or multiply-add (MAD) operation is a common step that computes the product of two numbers and adds that product to an accumulator. The hardware unit that performs the operation is known as a multiplier–accumulator ; the operation itself is also often called a MAC or a MAD operation. The MAC operation modifies an accumulator a:
Altera Corporation is a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015 before becoming independent once again in 2024 as a company focused on development of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology and system on a chip FPGAs.
Loongson is the name of a family of general-purpose, MIPS architecture-compatible, later in-house LoongArch architecture microprocessors, as well as the name of the Chinese fabless company that develops them. The processors are alternately called Godson processors, which is described as its academic name.
In electronic design, a semiconductor intellectual property core, IP core or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or integrated circuit layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores can be licensed to another party or owned and used by a single party. The term comes from the licensing of the patent or source code copyright that exists in the design. Designers of system on chip (SoC), application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and systems of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) logic can use IP cores as building blocks.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a semiconductor's transistor count to its die area.
Tegra is a system on a chip (SoC) series developed by Nvidia for mobile devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistants, and mobile Internet devices. The Tegra integrates an ARM architecture central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), northbridge, southbridge, and memory controller onto one package. Early Tegra SoCs are designed as efficient multimedia processors. The Tegra-line evolved to emphasize performance for gaming and machine learning applications without sacrificing power efficiency, before taking a drastic shift in direction towards platforms that provide vehicular automation with the applied "Nvidia Drive" brand name on reference boards and its semiconductors; and with the "Nvidia Jetson" brand name for boards adequate for AI applications within e.g. robots or drones, and for various smart high level automation purposes.
Rockchip is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Fuzhou, Fujian province. It has offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Hong Kong. It designs system on a chip (SoC) products, using the ARM architecture licensed from ARM Holdings for the majority of its projects.
The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power ISA-based products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. IBM's focus is to open up technology surrounding their Power Architecture offerings, such as processor specifications, firmware, and software with a liberal license, and will be using a collaborative development model with their partners.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. The project began in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, transferred to the RISC-V Foundation in 2015, and on to RISC-V International, a Swiss non-profit entity, in November 2019. Like several other RISC ISAs, e.g. Amber (ARMv2) or OpenRISC, RISC-V is offered under royalty-free open-source licenses. The documents defining the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) are offered under a Creative Commons license or a BSD License.
ARC embedded system processors are a family of 32-bit and 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) central processing units (CPUs) originally designed by ARC International.
GigaDevice Semiconductor is a Chinese NOR flash memory designer. It also produces microcontrollers, some of them are based on the ARM architecture, and other on the RISC-V architecture.
SiFive, Inc. is an American fabless semiconductor company and provider of commercial RISC-V processors and silicon chips based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Its products include cores, SoCs, IPs, and development boards.
Apple still holds 14.8 percent of ARM [...]
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)ARM is the market-leading architecture in mobile devices worldwide, with 80% of all handsets containing at least one ARM core.
Cray claims its ARM compiler demonstrated better performance in two-thirds of 135 benchmarks, and much better performance – 20 percent or more – in one-third of them, compared to open source ARM compilers from LLVM and GNU. The Cray ThunderX2 blades can be mixed with other XC50 blades outfitted with Intel Xeon-SP or Xeon Phi processors and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Both air-cooled and liquid-cooled options are available. Cray already has one customer lined up for the ThunderX2-powered XC50: the Great Western 4 (GW4) Alliance, a research consortium of four UK universities (Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter). In January 2017, the alliance announced it had contracted Cray to build "Isambard," a 10,000-core ARM-based supercomputer, which will provide a Tier 2 HPC service. The UK's Met Office was also involved on the deal, since it was interested in seeing how its weather and climate codes would run on such a machine. The system will be paid for out of a £3 million award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It's scheduled to be fully deployed by the end of this year.
only 32-bit x86 applications are supported