2026-10-15
100 Products That Changed the World · #22: The ARM Architecture
Born in a converted barn in Cambridge, England in 1985. Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber designed the first ARM1 processor with just 25,000 transistors — so frugal that during its first test, engineers forgot to switch on the power supply and the chip ran flawlessly on leakage current from the signal pins alone. Owning zero fabs and manufacturing zero physical chips, ARM licensed "low power" to the world, powering over 300 billion chips and 99% of all smartphones. Ranked
