UK smartphone processor company

Merlin5

Merlin5

Merlin5

Soldato
Joined
17 Aug 2009
Posts
18,599
Location
Finchley, London
I was watching 'Made in Britain' on BBC just now with Evan Davis. In Cambridge in 'Silicon Fen', is a company called ARM, relatively unheard of. They've been around since the 1980's apparently and design and license, but not manufacture, processors for smart phones amongst other things. There's a tour around the offices and some phone computing experiments with a rubiks cube. I wonder if ARM have put any of their stuff in the SGS2 or HTC phones .:) I know they have chips in the iphones.

From 23:50 for about 7 or 8 minutes. Quite interesting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b012brrc/Made_in_Britain_Episode_2/
 
Not sure if serious?

ARM is hardly relatively unheard of, I can't think of a single smartphone that doesn't use an ARM chip, and they're probably in a large number of older 'feature' phones as well...

EDIT: and god know how many other devices as well, in the mobile/embedded/low-power market ARM have ruled for decades, and there's no sign of that stopping, in fact they seem to be branching out into more 'normal' uses (netbook/low-end laptops coming soon...)
 
Merlin5 said:
I was watching 'Made in Britain' on BBC just now with Evan Davis. In Cambridge in 'Silicon Fen', is a company called ARM, relatively unheard of.
Click to expand...

They are probably one of the most famous companies there is within the mobile device area. :eek:
 
Well he says "ARM, it's a very successful company, one of the best, and remarkably, few people have actually heard of it". I'm one of them that have never heard of it. :p
 
It's not a household name, no. It's certainly got less brand power than Intel. I don't think this forum is a good cross-section of the population. :)

I know some people who work at ARM. They're a very smart bunch.
 
Acorn computers designed the BBC micro. They followed it up with the Acorn Archimedes


The RISC chip in it went on to be refined by the Acorn spinoff ARM
 
ARM IP is in everything these days, chances are they/partners will be the dominant consumer chip maker within the next 5 years, well they are already for volume...

That was quite crap really, this is a much better recent interview.

 
Last edited:
spudbynight said:
Acorn computers designed the BBC micro. They followed it up with the Acorn Archimedes


The RISC chip in it went on to be refined by the Acorn spinoff ARM
Click to expand...

Was gonna mention this, millions of school children would have used computers powered by ARM/RISC CPUs in the late 80s and through much of the 90s - I became aware of ARM somewhere around 90-91 or so.

I am actually quite suprised we haven't seen RISC OS on smart phones tbh, its very sound under the hood and relatively easy to update to include more modern functionality, runs well on low powered devices with a wealth of legacy software and very easy to write software for and was substantially ahead of its time, would have been trivial to get everything that works under android (functionality wise) up and running on it.
 
Last edited:
sarge78 said:
ARM IP is in everything these days, chances are they/partners will be the dominant consumer chip maker within the next 5 years, well they are already for volume...

That was quite crap really, this is a much better recent interview.
Click to expand...

That quite an interesting vid
 
I found Evan a bit of a bumbling idiot to be honest, the dude from ARM was showing him the very first chip they designed and Evan was more concerned that the CRT wasn't a touchscreen...
Oh, and not forgetting his section in china.. oy vey.
Although that mobile phone driven hovercraft looked awesome.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom