Industry Expert Blogs

ARM was founded on November 27th 1990 in a converted barn outside Cambridge to exploit Acorn’s single greatest asset, the intellectual property bound up in its home-grown Acorn – now Advanced – Risc Machine processors. 20 Billion ARM processors have been shipped these past 20 years. 100 Billion are expected for the next 10 years.

The initial investment was $275 Thousand from VLSI and $1.5 Million from Apple.

ARM’s first task was to design a processor chip for the Apple Newton handheld, which for some reason commercially flopped. Could the reason have been its $800 price? Ironically, $800 is the same price consumers are paying for an unlocked iPhone today.