Arm

Arm (Arm Holdings) designs processor architectures and licenses them; it does not manufacture or sell chips. Its product is intellectual property: the ARM architecture, the instruction set a processor understands, and ready-made CPU core designs. Companies like Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTek pay Arm for a license, build their own chips with it, and have them manufactured by a foundry such as TSMC.

ARM processors were built from the start to use little power, which is why nearly every smartphone and tablet runs on one. That efficiency has since moved up: Apple's M-series Mac chips, Amazon's Graviton servers on AWS and many other data center chips are ARM-based. This is the 'ARM vs x86' contest: x86, from Intel and AMD, ruled PCs and servers for decades, and ARM keeps winning ground there.

Arm earns money in two ways: a license fee to use its designs, and a small royalty for every chip shipped with them. Each royalty is tiny, but tens of billions of ARM chips ship every year, in phones, cars, TVs and appliances. Founded in Cambridge, England, in 1990, Arm is majority-owned by the Japanese group SoftBank.