ARM chip maker to be bought for $32 billion by Softbank

Japan’s Softbank has made an offer of $32 billion to buy mobile chipmaker, ARM Holdings Inc. ARM licenses its chip designs to big brands such as Samsung, Apple, NVidia, Qualcomm, Huawei/HiSilicon and many others.

ARM usually licenses processor designs to companies like Qualcomm or Nvidia, who get chips made from contract chip makers like GlobalFoundries and TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.). TSMC, also known as Taiwan Semiconductor, is the world’s largest dedicated independent (pure-play) semiconductor foundry.

You should be familiar with the popular Snapdragon series of chips that are manufactured by Qualcomm. These chips are based on the design and architecture of ARM chips like the Cortex A53, Cortex A72 and A73. The Mali GPU series is also designed by ARM.

Samsung’s Exynos chips are also based on ARM architecture with Cortex A53 and Cortex A57 making up the Exynos 7 and Exynos 8 Octa chips. Even the A9 chip by Apple is also manufactured by Samsung and TSMC.

An ARM processor is one of a family of CPUs based on the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architecture developed by Advanced RISC Machines (ARM). ARM makes 32-bit and 64-bit RISC multi-core processors. Unlike other CPU manufacturers like Intel, ARM only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP), rather than manufacturing and selling its own physical CPUs, GPUs, SoCs or microcontrollers.

{source: BBC}