Coming of age
UK low-power chip designer ARM has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the company for the past few days, and has chosen to coincide this event with the unveiling of a new building, which will house its growing graphics operations.
According to ARM's own timeline, the company actually came into existence 25 years ago as a division of Acorn Computer. When Acorn and Apple began collaborating on a chip to run Apple's ill-fated Newton handheld device, they spun-off that division to form ARM 20 years ago.
While ARM has come into the mainstream as smartphones and tablets - and the low-power processors required to run them - have taken the limelight away from PCs, it has been generating excitement for some time.
We have been speculating that its shares might be somewhat over-valued amid all the mobile fervour, but when it IPOed it generated a lot of investor interest, and its NASDAQ shares got close to $50 at the height of the dotcom bubble. They were $18.64 at time of writing.
Having established itself as the dominant low-power CPU designer, ARM has set its sights on low-power graphics, where former ally Imagination Technologies is the incumbent. To emphasise how serious it is about this market, ARM has announced the opening of a new building at its Cambridge campus that will house its multimedia processing team.
There are various celebrations going on, such as a massive piss-up tonight. We've also heard that every full-time employee got given an iPad. We'd like to offer our congratulations to ARM - it's great to see the UK well represented in a technology market dominated by the US and Taiwan. We'll leave you with this short video history made by ARM.
