ARM architecture family
family of RISC-based computer architectures
ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm) is a family of RISC instruction set architectures for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the instruction set architecture and licenses it to other companies, who build the physical devices that use the instruction set. It also designs and licenses cores that implement these instruction set architectures.
Due to their low costs, low power consumption, and low heat generation, ARM processors are useful for light, portable, battery-powered devices, including smartphones, laptops, and tablet computers, as well as embedded systems. However, ARM processors are also used for desktops and servers, including Fugaku, the world's fastest supercomputer from 2020 to 2022. With over 230 billion ARM chips produced, since at least 2003, and with its dominance increasing every year, ARM is the most widely used family of instruction set architectures.
There have been several generations of the ARM design. The original ARM1 used a 32-bit internal structure but had a 26-bit address space that limited it to 64 MB of main memory. This limitation was removed in the ARMv3 series, which has a 32-bit address space, and several additional generations up to ARMv7 remained 32-bit. Released in 2011, the ARMv8-A architecture added support for a 64-bit address space and 64-bit arithmetic with its new 32-bit fixed-length instruction set.
“ARM architecture family” enters the record as family of RISC-based computer architectures. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what architecture, family and RISC-based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16980. The Library of Congress control number is sh2015001756. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 2022, 2003 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “ARM architecture family” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.