 design was that 80 per cent of the time a chip used just 20 per cent of its instructions, so the rest could be stripped out to reduce cost and power consumption and tasks could be broken down into a handful of simple instructions. Other RISC projects were fixed on producing high-end business workstations but Wilson and Furber favoured the mass market. Their Acorn RISC Machine – later Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) – delivered 25 times the performance of the top-selling BBC Micro computer. The design featured in the Acorn Archi){kind=link}
Ahead of a landmark public listing, one of the UK’s biggest success stories is facing an identity crisis
When the chip designer Arm shortly sells shares in this year’s most closely watched initial public offering (IPO), it will represent for many the final Americanisation of a great British company.
Born from the ashes of Acorn Computers in Cambridge 33 years ago, Arm was a constituent of the FTSE 100 until its takeover by the Japanese investment group SoftBank for £24bn in 2016.
When that deal was considered by Arm’s board in the weeks that followed the Brexit referendum, its directors counted years of experience accumulated at famous British brands including EMI, easyJet, Vodafone and Pilkington.
Re-emerging onto the public market on the other side of the Atlantic with a $60bn valuation in its sights, Arm will be guided by a board remade with Wall Street squarely in mind and featuring former executives from AOL, Intel and Qualcomm.