“..few people know much about ARM, the British company whose technology is central to so many of the devices seen at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.”
“ARM doesn’t build the chips itself; it designs the cores–or central brains–used on those chips. I like to compare it to selling a basic cake recipe. If you’re a baker whose expertise is making really great frosting, why bother dreaming up a brand-new cake recipe when you can use an existing one, and instead use your time and effort to make great frosting? A lot of semiconductor and electronics companies have reached the same conclusion, and paid to license ARM’s recipes for chips, and then built their own custom enhancements around the ARM core.
It’s a pretty popular recipe. The company issued more than 700 licenses as of last year to some 250 chip companies, which then turned around and sold the chips to more than 1,000 manufacturers. ARM estimates that in 2009 four billion chips based on its designs were sold, and that more than 20 billion have been sold in the two decades since the company launched.”
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