Arm Holdings
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit 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-chip 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, Mali, and the newer Immortalis.
Arm's main CPU competitors in servers include IBM, Intel and AMD. Intel competed with ARM-based chips in mobile devices but Arm no longer has any competition in that space. Arm's main GPU competitors include mobile GPUs from technology companies Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm, 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 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. The transaction was completed on 5 September 2016. A planned takeover deal by Nvidia, announced in 2020, collapsed in February 2022, with SoftBank subsequently deciding to pursue an initial public offering on the Nasdaq in 2023, valuing Arm at billion.
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". 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", 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 the name are in sentence case.
Founding
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. Larry Tesler, Apple VP was a key person and he helped recruit the first CEO at the joint venture, Robin Saxby. 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 per cent.In 2010, ARM joined with IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Freescale Semiconductor in forming a non-profit open source engineering company, Linaro.
Acquisitions and divestments
;1999;2000
;2001
;2003
;2004
;2005
;2006
;2008
;2011
;2013
;2014
;2015
;2016
;2018
;2019
;2020
Changes of ownership
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. The transaction was completed on 5 September 2016.In 2017, a 25% stake of Arm was transferred to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which received investment from the Saudi sovereign fund.
Attempted acquisition by Nvidia and initial public offering
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. 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. It was also being battled by Arm China, its subsidiary, a majority stake of which was held by Chinese investors. The acquisition was initially scheduled to conclude before the end of 2022 per the contract. 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 due to the aforementioned regulatory pressure and hurdles.Arm filed for an IPO on 21 August 2023 on the Nasdaq, rather than the LSE. A few days earlier, SoftBank Group bought back the 25% stake from Vision Fund for around $16 billion, valuing Arm at over $64 billion. 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.
Dispute over Arm China leadership
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, 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. 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.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. In February 2022, Allen Wu, the CEO of Arm China, floated the idea of a public offering of the Chinese subsidiary in 2025.
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. Subsequently, in 2023, key staff left to form their own chip design startup Borui Jingxin, which competes with Arm China, particularly for engineers.
Operations
Unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers, such as Intel, Freescale and Renesas, ARM only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property, 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.Image:ARM-HP-PRINTER.JPG|thumb|right|An ARM processor in a Hewlett-Packard PSC-1315 printer, produced for HP by STMicroelectronics
Technology
A characteristic feature of Arm processors is their low electric power consumption, which makes them particularly suitable for use in portable devices.Arm processors are used as the main CPU for most mobile phones many PDAs and handhelds, like the Apple iPod and iPad, and computer games and as well as many other applications, including GPS navigation devices, digital cameras and televisions.
Arm supercomputers
The world's second fastest supercomputer in 2022, the Japanese Fugaku is based on Arm AArch64 architecture.The supercomputer maker Cray has added an "ARM Option" 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.
Fujitsu 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 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 called Hammer was based on X-Gene by Applied Micro. The second generation called Sullivan was based Cavium's ThunderXs processors. The third generation 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.