ARM designs
ARM is not a manufacturer like Intel, in fact it's not even a fabless semiconductor company like NVIDIA or as AMD is transforming itself into. It's essentially the holder of a bunch of semiconductor intellectual property (IP) which it licenses to original design manufacturers (ODMs).
They then use this IP to design components which they manufacture and sell to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), who in turn build them into end products.
While they used to use a simple numerical naming system (ARM 9, ARM 10, etc), ARM's latest generation of designs have been given the Cortex brand and subdivided by letter according to their application.
This next slide gives you an idea of the current and previous generation designs and their applications. Those bars with a ‘4X' in them indicate the potential to use up to four cores in one processor.
