The big moving picture: As part of their last quarterly written report, Arm has revealed that the popularity of their processor designs has continued to increase exponentially. Manufacturing partners have recorded shipments of half dozen.7 billion chips based on Arm designs, which is roughly 842 chips produced every second, an unprecedented rate.

Arm is the largest designer of processors in the world, if the sale of their designs is counted instead of the number of designs they produce: their rather slim Mali GPU series, for instance, encompasses just ix models only has been the number 1 shipping GPU since 2022. If Arm sold just their most popular product, the Cortex-M CPU series, so they'd still be the largest designer of processors in the earth. Concluding quarter, 4.four billion Cortex-M designs were shipped.

The popularity of Cortex-M designs isn't mysterious and neither is the wider success of Arm. In the IoT realm, the almost affordable and efficient option is Cortex-M. Arm's Cortex-A serial forms the footing of all smartphone processors, and their Cortex-R series covers critical applications like medical equipment. From the "world'south number one supercomputer down to the tiniest ultra-low power devices," Arm'due south wriggled its way in, says Rene Haas, President of the IP Products Group at Arm. And he's not exaggerating.

But Haas doesn't attribute Arm's recent successes to his ain squad. Instead, he calls the contempo shipments a "attestation to the incredible innovation of [Arm's] partners," referring to the 530 licensees that use Arm's designs to produce their own products. Subtract the flattery, though, and he's really crediting Arm's business model.

The closest comparison might be a tape label. Arm doesn't industry products, and nor are their designs immediately manufacturable. They license the most fundamental of processor core designs, along with the accompanying patents and software, to other companies to be integrated into products. Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm all employ the aforementioned Arm designs to produce wildly different smartphone processors, for instance.

Final twelvemonth, Arm signed a record 175 new licenses, many to new licensees, which Haas thinks will accelerate the adoption of Arm products in 2022. Arm volition probably keep to permeate new markets this year as it did last, when information technology saw its first mainstream laptop implementation in MacBooks, and a major integration into Amazon servers.

Arm'south strong fourth quarter results are good news for the company, but they'll have placed added pressure on the looming acquisition by Nvidia -- read more nigh that here.

Prototype credit: Fritzchens Fritz, Umberto