# Arm

> The British company that designs the processor blueprints inside almost every phone.

- Level: Intermediate
- Topics: Tech companies, Hardware
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/arm/
- In Spanish: [Arm](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/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.

## An analogy

A company that writes the rules of a language and sells dictionaries. It never writes the books itself, but almost every author in a huge market writes in its language and pays a little for each copy sold.

## Keep in mind

- Licenses processor designs; never manufactures chips.
- Its customers (Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung) build ARM chips and a foundry makes them.
- ARM rules phones for its low power use and is growing in laptops and servers.
- Earns license fees plus a royalty per chip shipped.

## Go deeper

- [Arm, company overview (official site)](https://www.arm.com/company)
- [Arm Holdings on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings)
- [ARM architecture family on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family)

## Related terms

- [CPU](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cpu/): The chip that runs your programs, one instruction after another, very fast.
- [Chip](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/semiconductor-chip/): A sliver of silicon carrying billions of tiny switches that compute and remember.
- [Cores and threads](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cpu-cores-and-threads/): Why a CPU is really several processors, and why it can juggle even more tasks.
- [Apple](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/apple/): The company that sells the iPhone and the Mac, plus the services that run on them.
- [Qualcomm](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/qualcomm/): Designs the chips, and owns key patents, that let phones talk to cell towers.
- [Samsung](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/samsung/): Korean giant that sells phones and TVs, and makes much of the world's memory chips.
- [TSMC](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/tsmc/): The factory that makes the world's most advanced chips for everyone else.
- [Amazon](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/amazon/): An online store with its own delivery network, and the company that runs AWS.