How ARM Became The World’s Default Chip Architecture (with ARM CEO Rene Haas)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

Hello, Acquired listeners. Today, we have with us Rene Haas, the CEO of ARM Holdings. ARM is the company that develops the instruction set architecture, and many of the designs underpinning CPUs all over your life today, from our phones to our cars. And David and I actually did an episode way back in 2019 on the history of the company, which had a fascinating start out of Cambridge University. The company was publicly traded, then taken private in 2016 by SoftBank, then last year went public again, and is now valued at around $150 billion. Rene has quite the career himself in semiconductors. He's been at ARM for the last 11 years, and before that was a VP at Nvidia reporting to Jensen. Rene, welcome to Acquired.

Rene Haas (0:45)

Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here with you both.

David Rosenthal (0:47)

Pleasure to have you.

Ben Gilbert (0:48)

Pleasure is all ours. Well, I thought a fun way to start us off, since there's a lot of people listening to this that are gonna see ARM Holdings and say, I know exactly what that is, I know about the strategic shift that they have going on, I've been following every earnings call since they went public, and there's people that are gonna say, ARM, what is that? So maybe to level set everyone on how important ARM is in the world, what are the types of devices where the ARM instructions at architecture and ARM designs are used?

Rene Haas (1:19)

So ARM does CPUs, and what is a CPU? The CPU is the digital brain of every modern electronic device. That is your television set, your thermostat, your car. We were having a chat maybe about talking about a day in the life inside ARM, and I can walk through some of all the ARM devices inside my home. But simplest way to think about it is we do CPUs, and that CPU is the digital brain of every modern electronic device.

Ben Gilbert (1:46)

And so what is your relationship then with, you know, in my head, Apple makes the CPU in my phone. It's the A18 or in my Mac, the M4. What do you mean ARM does CPUs?

Rene Haas (1:57)

Yeah, so drilling down one level deeper, we do the design, the ISA, which is the instruction set architecture. And we license that as either an instruction set architecture to a partner. They can develop their own CPU based on ARM. That's what Apple does. Or we design and build our own CPUs and license those CPUs to companies like Samsung, MediaTek, Tesla, Qualcomm, Amazon, et cetera. So we deliver it in two different ways, but those CPUs that you mentioned inside your iPhone and inside your MacBook, those are all ARM based.

David Rosenthal (2:33)

And so where we were going with this, I mean, today, if you were to imagine your house, my house, Ben's house, any house, how many devices have an ARM chip in them?

Ben Gilbert (2:44)

And is that a different question than how many ARM chips are floating around my house?

Rene Haas (2:48)

It's a hard question to answer in terms of just how many ARM chips are in my house or how many ARM chips get delivered in terms of a typical application space, because it really varies. But again, let's go back to first principles, right? ARM designs the CPU, and that is the digital brain of every device, which means it runs all the complex software that either runs the dashboard or it runs the operating system or it runs an application. So, I was thinking about the question, and I'm going to drop a bunch of brand names here, but let's just kind of walk through. I pull my Audi into the garage. That Audi has ARM processors. Those ARM processors are what you see running the display and that digital dashboard. They're also helping with some of the driver assist, and they're probably in the power locks, power windows, et cetera, et cetera. I have a Nest doorbell camera.

That's ARM, and that's ARM that basically runs the camera, interfaces with the doorbell, et cetera, et cetera. Walking by the LG refrigerator or Wolf stove, I can assure you both of those have ARM inside too. They're probably running the displays, they're probably running the temperatures in the stove, they're definitely running the display, they're running everything in terms of the oven. Turn on the television set, which is a Samsung. That Samsung digital TV, it's actually running an operating system. So when you run all those apps and everything that you see kind of shows up on there, that's a version of Android. That's all ARM. Let's say I want to go downstairs and do some gaming. My PS5 has ARM inside. Most likely running some of the display controllers and running some of the stuff with it with a game controller. And if I want to flip through on my Pixel phone, that is ARM inside running Android. And I've got my iPad next to me, that's all ARM. So you can imagine just about everything that you interacted with that does something, that either runs an application, recognizes your face, gives you some display information, ARM did all of that.