Investing his own small amount of money to invest in Acorn Computer Company, Yu Zixian didn't know if it was cost-effective. But he knows that if he doesn't do it today, he will miss the best opportunity to meddle in the Acorn computer company, and he may regret it in the future! After all, taking advantage of the fire to rob is the most cost-effective and labor-saving way, and at present, the Acorn computer company has fallen into a huge predicament, and even more because the Acorn computer company is the predecessor of the ARM computer company.

When it comes to computers, we have to talk about microprocessors (CPUs), and the core of microprocessors is various types of chips, and chip architecture is the first step in core building. The mainstream and most widely used chip architectures in the market in later generations are X86 and ARM. The x86 architecture belongs to Intel in the United States, and the ARM chip architecture belongs to ARM in the United Kingdom.

From the establishment of ARM in 1990 to the 9102 year of the later generations, the global shipment of chips based on ARM architecture has reached 100 billion, covering 80% of the world's population, and more than 95% of the world's smartphones use ARM-designed processors, including countless devices under Apple and Samsung, of course, including the republic's Xiaomi mobile phones and the exciting Huawei HiSilicon processors, all of which use the ARM architecture; in addition, 85% of the world's of mobile devices, including phones, tablets, and laptops, use ARM-based processors, and more than 70% of smart TVs also use ARM-based processors.

In the later 9102, it is not an exaggeration to say that ARM's products cover the entire mobile phone industry. If you pick up an electronic product, more than 80% of it may be an ARM product.

Even when the sweater war entered the stage of strategic stalemate, because of the pressure of the United States, it was once rumored that ARM had to give up cooperation with Huawei and stop the latest version of the ARM V9 instruction set authorization, which seriously affected the upgrading of Huawei Haixi processors.

The strength of the ARM architecture speaks for itself.

Now only its predecessor, Acorn Computer Company, ARM Computer Company, will be established at the end of December this year.

This gave Yu Zixian the opportunity to intervene in advance.

In late 1978, physicist Hermann Hauser and engineer Chris Currie founded what was later renamed Acorn Computer Company, based in Cambridge, England, to supply electronic equipment to the United Kingdom. The company caught up with the PC wind, partnering with BBC Micro to make Acorn a profit of £8.6 million, and Acorn has since been known as the "British Apple computer".

After that, Acorn entered the black alley. When developing the new model, Acorn was disappointed with the Motorola processor. Motorola's expensive and slow CPU made Acorn decide to change partners, but he didn't expect to be rejected by Intel, so he had to develop his own processor.

Eighteen months later, Acorn finally made its first processor, the ARM1 (a 32-bit, 6MHz, 3.0m processor whose users include Apple's Newton pad, etc.), and Acorn designed and sold its own chips in the traditional way, using it to make a computer with RISC instruction sets. However, compared with the 386 processor launched by Intel at the same time, it was not competitive at all, and it happened to encounter a financial crisis, and it was difficult to escape the fate of being acquired.

After being acquired, Acorn was arranged with all kinds of "messy" applied research, which actually belonged to the ranks of being beaten into the cold palace. Acorn decided to spin off because he was too poor to sell off the development team, and not many companies could afford to support such a luxury development team at the time.

Just when management was in despair, Apple stepped in.

In the late 1990s, Acorn received investment from Apple and VLSI, plus a total of £3.25 million in start-up capital raised by 12 engineers out of their own pockets, to set up today's ARM in an office warehouse.

In fact, ARM didn't get to the top of its life all at once because of the restructuring. In the early days of the business, the headquarters office set up in an 18th-century warehouse, even the first conference table was won by CEO Hermann Hauser and a furniture salesman with a coin toss, and Hauser also wanted to win a set of tables with drawers in the billiard room of the bar, but it didn't work, and ARM engineers had to work on tables without drawers. Such a difficult office environment did not produce any inspirational stories.

Originally, Apple invested in ARM, a small company with no sense of existence, because it was interested in its low-power and cheap chips, but the two sides failed in the handheld computer of cooperation.

Tenacity is always the quality of a good company, and ARM, which has become more and more courageous, has not lost confidence because of this, and Hauser found the parent company after the acquisition was hopeless.

Slowly, ARM began to operate as an independent commercial company. In product research and development, we will no longer do the Intel CISC instructions that have been popularized in the computer field, and instead develop RISC reduced instructions that are not favored by the market. At the same time, the core of the product is redefined: low cost, low power consumption, and high efficiency.

Because of financial problems, ARM made another decision: neither to produce nor design chips, but to design only the central processing unit, which was licensed to semiconductor companies, and the other party could add their own designs to its technology.

This kind of forced business model and product positioning has no outstanding advantages in the era of PCs and high-performance processors. It wasn't until 1993 that ARM got out of financial crisis with the 6110 mobile phone in partnership with Nokia. At this time, manufacturers discovered that the chip designed by ARM, which was profitable for the first time, was actually a good match for mobile phones!

In the end, ARM, which achieved a little success, was listed on the NASDAQ and the London Stock Exchange in 1998, and shipped 50 million chips based on the ARM architecture in the same year. Later, the advent of the mobile era allowed ARM to really take off, which led to the later chip hegemony in the mobile field.

In 2016, ARM was acquired by SoftBank for $31 billion and delisted after the transaction was completed, completing the largest acquisition since SoftBank began.

Back in September, Acorn received investment from Apple and VLSI, plus 12 engineers paid out of their own pockets to raise £3.25 million in start-up capital to set up the future ARM in the warehouse.

Although Yu Zixian does not know whether Apple and VLSI have reached a relevant agreement with Acorn, according to the later Acorn company, which was officially reorganized into ARM Computer Company on November 27 this year, it is still very promising to intervene by himself.

At that time, Apple invested 1.5 million pounds, chip maker VLSI invested 250,000 pounds, and Acorn itself invested 1.5 million pounds in intellectual property and 12 engineers. In the end, Apple took a 42.3% stake.

Judging from the amount of investment and shares occupied by Apple at that time, Yu Zixian's $400,000 (equivalent to 320,000 pounds) can probably acquire 8%-10% of the company's shares.

Of course, this share is far from meeting the requirements of controlling shares, but Yu Zixian is not afraid, as long as he inserts one foot, there is a way to insert two feet!

Take the opportunity to build your own "winter" alliance.