ARM has been established for 40 years and has been authorized to ship 250 billion chips.

In 1978, two talented individuals, Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser, co-founded Acorn Computers, a Cambridge-based startup that had humble beginnings and landed a manufacturing contract for the BBC Micro. The BBC Micro is part of a UK government initiative to see every classroom need a computer.

Acorn Computers may have thought it was a victory for them, but it turned out that this little thing changed the technology landscape forever. Acorn Computers ultimately decided to develop its own processor, which was unheard of for a small company.

In 1980, two engineers, Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, were assigned to design a 32-bit processor. Although limited resources hampered their development progress, ARM1 was finally born in 1985, using only 25,000 transistors and using a 3-micron process. The advantage of this chip is lower power consumption and excellent performance. This is just the beginning for the British chip design company. Today, ARM celebrates its 40th anniversary, including an important milestone that will forever be etched in history: the shipment of the 250 billionth chip in 40 years.

April 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the birth of the Arm architecture. What started as an ambitious project in a small corner of Cambridge, UK, has grown into the world's most widely used computing architecture, powering billions of devices - from sensors, smartphones, and laptops to cars, data centers, and more.

The story of Arm architecture began more than four decades ago, driven by a small team with an ambitious vision: to make high-performance, low-power computing accessible to everyone. Embracing simplicity, elegance, and simplicity, this architecture lays the foundation for a new era of efficient, scalable technology.

For those who question whether ARM's low-power CPU designs are the result of forethought, the opposite is true. At the time, Acorn Computers didn't have the wherewithal to take advantage of expensive ceramic chip packaging, so it had to go with cheaper plastic packaging, which meant the processor had to be impeccably energy efficient. And there were no tools to measure the power consumption of the chip at the time, so in order to reduce power consumption and ensure safety, ARM's design was too complex.

ARM's architectural designs are still used in modern chips today, and the British chip design company said in its latest blog post that "the journey is far from over" as it sets its sights on the data center market, but also on artificial intelligence, edge computing and sustainability.