None of this is my area of expertise. I’m just old enough to have lived through this era and remember what happened. Many people don’t realize ARM can trace it

None of this is my area of expertise. I’m just old enough to have lived through this era and remember what happened. Many people don’t realize ARM can trace its origins back to the BBC Micro. For a variety of reasons it found a niche in low power applications, even 30+ years ago. ARM, the company, simply sells licenses without producing its own silicon. There’s concern now with it going public that it will seek revenue by jacking up licensing costs. It’s mobile devices where ARM flourished and entered public consciousness. There used to be other platforms but they died off. Intel sold XScale years ago because of a lack of vision. ARM processors got sufficiently powerful to be in servers and power efficiency became a big deal. Google really transformed this space with sub-1.1 PUEs when no one outside even believed that was possible. Performance per Watt became a really big deal. Also, I’m not sure if this is entirely fair but I credit Apple with a lot of ARM’s success. They bought a company called PA Semi and pushed the envelope with what ARM can do. I think that may have been the best $400 million (IIRC) ever spent.