ARM today 25

25 years ago, on November 27, 1990, a team emerged from Acorn Computers that developed the ARM1, ARM2, and ARM3 microprocessors. Of the twelve co-founders, four continue to work for ARM to this day, among nearly four thousand employees gathered from 71 countries.

Until 1994, the entire ARM was housed in a large barn in the village of Swaffham Bulbeck, 13km from Cambridge; The company now has more than forty offices scattered across twenty countries.


ARM does not release processors itself; but its partners over 25 years have released 75 billion chips that implement one of the versions of the ARM architecture. This is an order of magnitude more than the number of bricks in the Great Wall of China!

In five years - from the first released ARM1 processor to the founding of ARM - 130 thousand chips were released. The first processor released by ARM separately from Acorn was the ARM610, designed specifically for use with Apple Newton , a tablet computer ahead of its time. Frustrated by the commercial failure of Newton, Apple abandoned the idea for a long 17 years; but the next tablet from Apple, the famous iPad, also used a processor from ARM - the Apple A4 based on the Cortex-A8. This year ARM chips are released almost atfifty thousand pieces every second - about 13 billion over the past 11 months!

About a quarter of all chips released are ARM7TDMI processor , manufactured since 1998.

But the most impressive achievement is that on the birthday of ARM on the hub appeared a post full of unjustified pessimism: “Today's world is amd64, armv7 and aarch64. Everything else is dead, Jim . ”
According to the OpenBSD developer, two of the three living architectures today are ARM architectures!