Industry Expert Blogs

If the 200 billion Arm-based chips shipped by our partners over the past three decades had been produced at a rate of only one per second, the first would have rolled off a stone-age production line in the Pastoral Neolithic period, somewhere around 4,300 BCE.

In reality, zero to 200 billion chips took a little over 30 years due to the incredibly steep ramp we’ve seen in Arm-based chip shipments by our partners. So much so that today close to 900 chips based on our architecture are produced every second. And many of these chips have shipped in products that have been instrumental in defining the modern world.

One device that stands out for me as having changed the trajectory of consumer electronics forever is the GSM mobile phone. From the ground-breaking Nokia 8110 ‘banana phone’, made famous by Keanu Reeves in the original Matrix movie, to the more consumer-friendly Nokia 6110, mobile phones became must-have devices which in the 90s helped to make Nokia a household name.

I’ve another strong reason to remember the transition to GSM as in 1994 I led the development of the Arm processor powering many of them, the ARM7TDMI. Nokia’s adoption of the ARM7TDMI led to a wave of interest in Arm across the accelerating technology sector, and it undoubtedly secured our position in mobile computing.

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