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The Ever So Unlikely Tale of How ARM Came To Rule the World
pacopico writes "About 24 years ago, a tiny chip company came to life in a Cambridge, England barn. It was called ARM, and it looked quite unlike any other chip company that had come before it. Businessweek has just published something of an oral history on the weird things that took place to let ARM end up dominating the mobile revolution and rivaling Coke and McDonald's as the most prolific consumer product company on the planet. The story also looks at what ARM's new CEO needs to do not to mess things up."
Intel's earnings last quarter were $2,630 M compared to $156 M for ARM holdings. So if ARM is "ruling the world" like this story claims, then ruling the world just ain't what it used to be. And I guess that is likely, if semiconductors stagnate as they seem to be.
You mean using a C compiler instead of a Java interpreter helps with speed and power consumption? Who could have thought?
As someone who had a BBC Micro as his first computer (lovely machine for tinkering), it's nice to see the descendants of Acorn survive the juggernaut of the PC and x86. And long may it continue, the last thing we need is a vertically integrated colossus like Intel dominating everything, no matter how good their PC processors are.
I'm reading this and laughing. I've read the same kind of statement when they're using 300nm tech, 95nm tech, 65nm tech, and so on and so forth. Their public roadmap has 5nm tech around 2019-2022 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer). And as x86 inheritance slowly fades away, they can actually produce way smaller chips without backwards compatibility if the market demands it (very few applications run 1978 instructions nowadays, same goes for all that 16-bit protected mode wazoo).
Except when you include the pofits for making ARM chips from Qualcomn, Apple ( if Apple had actually seperated out their chip making division, ), Samsung, Allwinner etc. that number changes drastically.
The only company making money off Intel chips is Intel there are many companies making ARM chips and you have to include the companies making the chip.