ARM

ARM HOLDINGS PLC /UK

A British chip-design company whose processor blueprints power most of the world's smartphones, tablets, and other electronics — companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung license its designs rather than buy chips from it. ARM was born in Cambridge in the 1980s, when engineers at the computer maker Acorn designed their own processor after finding nothing suitable on the market; the chip was named the Acorn RISC Machine. The name later became "Advanced RISC Machines" when the technology was spun off in 1990 with help from Apple, and the original design was reportedly created by two engineers in a single weekend.

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