Apple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9
> Furber and his co-designer, Sophie Wilson, had found research from the Berkeley campus of the University of California into a new type of processor: one that simplified the set of instructions it would follow, in order to enable a sleeker, more efficient design. This style of processing was called “reduced instruction set computing”, or Risc, and the Berkeley Risc designs had been put together by just two people, David Patterson and Carlo Sequin.
ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM.
> By 2007, Intel had abandoned the excesses of the company’s Pentium line
Pentium is a brand name, which still exists today. What the author is referring to is Intel's "NetBurst" architecture.
> powering the servers at companies like PayPal.
Citation needed. The CEO of X-Gene said PayPal has “has deployed and validated” services based on their CPU, but readily admits to having shipped only 10,000 units, which is just peanuts to datacentre guys. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/aookied_micro_q4_201...
Overall, I'm happy for ARM's continued success, and I hope that they and the rest of the semiconductor industry will continue to innovate and bring the performance per watt up.
That being said, this Guardian article is crap. It's factually incorrect in places, missing sources for claims, and generally doesn't do anything to actually explain why people supposedly don't know who ARM is.
tl;dr - Some guys in Cambridge, who are fab-less, made a CPU from a RISC design. They license the designs to partners who can add whatever they want around the CPU (or redesign the CPU as long as they conform to the instruction set, as Apple does). The reason they're "not well known" is because they don't sell CPUs themselves, companies like Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, etc do.