Last week ARM announced that Tudor Brown, President and Co-founder of the British semiconductor company, is going to retire in May 2012. Since the inception of ARM in 1990, their technology has shipped in over 15 billion chips. What makes ARM such a unique company, and what’s given them the success that they’re now experiencing, is that they look at the business model of microprocessors from a completely different angle. Instead of designing chips and then making them in fabs that cost far too much to build, maintain, and upgrade every few years, ARM simply does the best that they can in terms of design and then licenses their work out to anyone willing to cough up the dough. There’s a reason Intel based products are expensive, they need to recoup their investments. ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, and NVIDIA on the other hand, these companies don’t have to worry about the dirty job of building chips; their focus is on leveraging ARM’s predesigned processors and slapping them on the most compelling system on chip they can make while also making sure that Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, whatever, is optimized to run perfectly on said chip.
Even better, say you don’t want to use a predesigned ARM core like the Cortex A8 that’s in the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and Samsung Galaxy S. Just call up ARM and ask them for the schematics for the ARM architecture and you can build your own ARM compatible chip. Similar to how AMD makes x86 compatible chips, Qualcomm and Marvell make ARMv7 compatible chips. It’s more expensive for them to do that, but just look at where Qualcomm is today thanks to the blood, sweat, and tears they’ve poured into Snapdragon. Nokia’s first Windows Phones have Qualcomm inside, half the Android phones on the market have Qualcomm inside, and we’re pretty sure that quite a few laptops running Windows 8 are going to have Qualcomm inside once they start shipping in 2012.
Anyway, Brown says ARM is in a “very strong position” for future growth, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that mobile is blowing up.