ARM
ARM is a blueprint for processors, that is, for the computing chips in computers and phones. The British company Arm designs this blueprint and sells licenses for it instead of manufacturing chips itself — almost every smartphone in the world runs on it.
Every computer and every phone contains a computing chip that does the actual work. For a program to run on this chip, both must speak the same language. This language is a fixed list of instructions that the chip understands: calculate, compare, fetch a number from memory. ARM is such an instruction list, designed by the British company Arm. The special thing about it: Arm doesn’t build chips itself. The company only sells the blueprint, and other companies manufacture their own chips from it.
From the phone to the data center
ARM blueprints were originally developed for devices that have to make do with a battery. Efficiency was therefore the top priority from the very beginning. That’s exactly what gave ARM the lead in smartphones. Practically every phone sold today uses an ARM-based chip, regardless of manufacturer.
For a long time, the classic competitor x86 from Intel and AMD was considered unrivaled in laptops and servers. That has shifted. Apple switched its Macs to its own ARM chips starting in 2020, achieving longer battery life at the same performance. Amazon, Google and Microsoft now design their own ARM server chips for their data centers.
That’s why ARM is an important name on the stock market. Electricity is the biggest cost block of a data center. As AI applications keep driving up power demand further, every watt saved turns into money. Nvidia, too, relies on ARM cores as the control unit alongside the graphics chips in its AI systems.
A blueprint for licensing
Arm works like an architecture firm that sells plans but never lays a single brick itself. Anyone who wants to build a chip buys a license and additionally pays a small fee per chip shipped. This fee is often only in the range of cents to dollars. With billions of devices per year, this still adds up enormously.
There are two tiers of licenses. Some customers take ready-designed compute cores from Arm and merely assemble them. Others, such as Apple, buy the rights to the instruction list and design the cores entirely themselves. Both paths lead to chips that run the same software.
Technically, ARM belongs to the architectures with comparatively few, simple instructions. The chip does less per step, but can be built leaner and more efficient as a result. A common misconception is that ARM is therefore fundamentally weaker than x86. The fastest Apple and Amazon chips show that this isn’t true.
Where ARM chips are already part of your everyday life
Your phone is the most obvious example, but it doesn’t stop there. ARM cores sit in TVs, Fritzboxes, cars, headphones, smartwatches and the Raspberry Pi. A MacBook with an M-chip and many Windows laptops with a Snapdragon processor also belong to this group.
In the news, you usually encounter the name in two contexts. First, with new chips: when Apple, Qualcomm or Amazon unveil a processor, it is typically ARM-based. Second, with the company itself. Arm Holdings is majority-owned by the Japanese investor Softbank and has been listed on the US Nasdaq stock exchange since 2023.
Another recurring theme is legal disputes over licenses, for instance between Arm and Qualcomm. Because so many devices depend on this one blueprint, any conflict over it quickly becomes industry news. Anyone reading reports about chips can hardly avoid ARM.