Pick of MWC 2012: Orange Santa Clara

Here's a long story.. as you might know, almost every phone in the world runs on the ARM chipset, making it the most popular processor family in the world. The ARM core has been around in one form or another for 25 years, developed initially by Acorn Computers in the UK. It's first application was in a line of computers under the "Archimedes" brand, and I actually saw one of the very first examples of these all those years ago.

Anyway, the irony is that ARM vanished on the desktop under the onslaught of the Intel/Windows platform, but it came to dominate the mobile phone world. Well, Intel want a slice of that market too and the Santa Clara is likely to be the first Intel Atom powered smartphone to market. It looks pretty decent too.

Here's a geeky pub quiz question - which three companies were instrumental in the creation of ARM as a spin off from Acorn? Obviously Acorn was one of them. Another one was a company called VLSI Technologies, now part of NXP Semiconductors. The third one was Apple, who used the ARM in their Newton product.. and who still use ARM today in the iPhone.