Who Founded Arm Holdings?

The founding of Arm (Advanced RISC Machines) is a quintessentially British technology story, born out of a desperate need to build a more efficient computer processor. The company's roots lie in Acorn Computers, a pioneering British tech company often referred to as the 'British Apple,' founded in 1978 in Cambridge by Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry. In the early 1980s, Acorn achieved success with the BBC Micro, an educational computer used in schools across the UK. However, as Acorn sought to build a more powerful successor to the BBC Micro, they ran into a critical bottleneck. The existing microprocessors on the market, like the Motorola 68000, were powerful but consumed too much energy and were ill-suited for the elegant, responsive operating system Acorn was designing. Frustrated by the available options, a small, effective team of Acorn engineers, led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, decided to design their own processor from scratch. Wilson designed the instruction set (the basic language the processor understands), and Furber designed the microarchitecture. Their defining innovation was embracing the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) philosophy, which prioritized simplicity and efficiency over complex, power-hungry instructions. The resulting Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) processor was a marvel of engineering, running significantly faster than rival chips while consuming a fraction of the electricity. This extreme power efficiency caught the attention of Apple who was desperately searching for a low-power processor for their new, influential handheld device, the Apple Newton. In 1990, Apple, Acorn, and VLSI Technology formed a new, independent joint venture named Advanced RISC Machines (later simply Arm). While the Apple Newton was a commercial failure, the foundational IP established by Wilson, Furber, and the founding engineers at Arm laid the architectural groundwork for the entire global mobile computing revolution, ensuring that decades later, almost every smartphone on Earth would run on their foundational designs.

Robin Saxby was born in 1947 in Chesterfield. Education: University of Liverpool; Brookfield Community School.

Sophie Wilson, along with Steve Furber, designed the original ARM processor at Acorn Computers in 1983 to 1985. Wilson was responsible for the ARM instruction set architecture, a contribution that makes her one of the most consequentially influential chip architects in computing history, even as her role is less widely known outside technical communities than the commercial story of the companies that commercialized her design. Wilson became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, both among the United Kingdom's highest scientific honors. After the formation of Arm Ltd., Wilson did not join the new company directly, instead remaining at Acorn before the company's eventual dissolution. She joined Broadcom's Cambridge design center, where she has continued to work on processor and network chip design. Wilson was awarded a CBE in 2019 for services to the technology industry.

Sophie Wilson was born in 1957 in Leeds. Education: Selwyn College.

Steve Furber served as the ARM processor's lead hardware designer at Acorn before the formation of Arm Ltd., but like Sophie Wilson did not join the new company directly. Instead, Furber pursued an academic career, joining the University of Manchester as the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering. At Manchester, he led the development of the SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) project, a parallel computing system designed to simulate the brain's neural architecture, which became one of the most ambitious neuromorphic computing research programs in the world. Furber was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded a CBE in 2013 for services to computer science. He has remained an influential commentator on the semiconductor industry and on computing education in the United Kingdom, and his original ARM hardware design work is recognized as foundational to the mobile computing revolution.

Steve Furber was born in 1953. Education: Emmanuel College; St John's College.