Arm Holdings

Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company headquartered in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a holding company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group. "ARM" was originally an acronym for Acorn RISC Machine and later for Advanced RISC Machines. While ARM CPUs first appeared in the Acorn Archimedes, a desktop computer, today's systems include mostly embedded systems, including ARM CPUs used in virtually all modern smartphones, up to used in the fastest supercomputer. Processors based on designs licensed from Arm, or designed by licensees of one of the ARM instruction set architectures, are used in all classes of computing devices. Arm has two lines of graphics processing units (GPUs), Mali, and the newer Immortalis (which includes hardware-based ray-tracing). Arm's main CPU competitors in servers include IBM, Intel and AMD. Intel competed with ARM-based chips in mobile devices but Arm no longer has any competition in that space (although vendors of actual ARM-based chips compete within that arena). Arm's main GPU competitors include mobile GPUs from technology companies Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), Qualcomm (Adreno), and increasingly Nvidia, AMD, Samsung and Intel. While competing in GPUs, Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia all have combined their GPUs with Arm-licensed CPUs. Arm had a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It also had a secondary listing of American depositary receipts on New York's Nasdaq. However, Japanese multinational conglomerate SoftBank Group made an agreed offer...