6 reasons you should care about Softbank’s huge ARM purchase

By Patrick Goss

The news that Softbank has snapped up British tech giant ARM for £24 billion (c$31.8bn) might well be met by a shrug of the shoulders by the average person on the street, but the megabucks deal is pretty significant for a number of reasons.

You may not be all that familiar with the brand – something that the company has actively signed up for by choosing to be an almost silent partner to the world’s most glittering tech companies.

But ARM probably already plays a larger part in your life than you appreciate, and here’s why the deal is a big one.

ARM has a huge legacy in the history of computing

ARM, which was formed from an old familiar British computing brand Acorn (with involvement from Apple), and the name itself stems from Acorn RISC Machine.

Acorn was the company behind the famous BBC Micro – beloved by a generation and a computer that, along with the Sinclair Spectrum, played a huge part in luring a generation of the greatest games makers and programmers into their respective industries.

By 1990, ARM was spun off in conjunction with Apple as they worked on the Apple Newton, the low-cost, simple …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components