Today a British company of international importance was sold to a Japanese company for £24 billion.
The company named ARM Holdings revolutionised microprocessor design and development from 1983 onwards. Last year more ARM processors were produced than Intel produced in it's entire lifetime (Intel was founded in 1968).
Everyone is familiar with Intel, because of all the adverts on TV (Intel Inside), but the fact is Intel architecture has always been bloated and they followed trends, rather than made trends.
ARM originally stood for 'Acorn Risc Machine'. Anyone familiar with the Acorn name will probably remember that they used an Acorn computer at school, or they used a BBC Microcomputer which was Acorns route into the large scale production market for home and educational computers.
When Acorn found that American microprocessors (namely Intel, MOS and Motorola) were lagging in performance, Acorn engineers Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson decided it was time to design a new processor based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) technology, hence ARM processors were born.
ARM processors are now used in smart phones, TVs, cameras, washing machines and Rasbery PIs.
(But you won't see an advert on TV saying 'ARM Inside') .
Control is now with the Japanese. Lets just hope they don't decide to move operations to
an EU country.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36827769
It's a very sad day.
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