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Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

> The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)

> The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The instruction set for the cpus originated in Britain (now japan), the cpu design is almost all based in the US (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Apple).

> The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

The web was started by a Brit yes, the internet started long before in the US.

> Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British.

True

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> > The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

> By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)

When he moved to the USA Linux was already a popular OS, and he didn't move here in order to develop the kernel but to work for Transmeta.

> and he didn't move here in order to develop the kernel

He moved there and started the Linux foundation... what are you talking about?

Transmeta hired him, he moved, he liked it and stayed.

That's... not what happened. LF was formed by merging the FSG and OSDL. Only then did the combined entity have sufficient funding to hire Linus.

Nothing I said is in conflict with that.

He did not start the Linux Foundation.

The CPU implementation is done by Qualcomm, Apple, and the like. The CPU design is done by ARM, predominantly in the UK. The fact that Softbank (Japan) owns ARM has no bearing on where and who is doing the actual technical work.

That's incorrect, Apple designs their own micro architecture that implements the ARM ISA. Qualcomm, HiSilicon, and Samsung use ARM's reference micro architectures, which are mostly designed in Austin TX now, although some have been from the ARM Sophia, France office. Samsung also made custom uarchs at their Austin office for their Exynos chips but recently shut the operation down.

Not true - just look at the latest chip from Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A13

Yes it uses the arm instruction set, but it was completely designed by Apple. This is identical to Intel using the same 64 bit instruction set as AMD... you wouldn’t say AMD designs intels chips though.

Apple is largely an exception in the crowd of ARM SoCs manufacturers, though. A lot of companies just implements ARM cores, with their additional magic in other bits of the SoCs. The fact that Apple does it does not mean that ARM does not do any design.

Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Apple all license ARM designs. They're not the ones designing new ARM cores, they're licensing them. They're attaching all kinds of interesting other bits and bobs directly to those ARM cores, which is where their special sauce comes in. You can say the SOC design is all based in the US, but the CPU design is based in...wherever ARM does its CPU design. Which to be honest I don't know. :)

Maybe it's just pedantry since the SOCs are what has resulted in ARM taking over the mobile space (and also a big chunk of the embedded space. Your SSD and HDDs likely have multiple ARM cores).

> Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Apple all license ARM designs.

Not broadly true especially in the Apple case - Apple uses arm in the exact same way intel uses AMD. AMD created the 64 bit instruction set but it would be ridiculous to say intel isn’t designing their own processors. Similarly Apple designs all their own chips but use the ARM instruction set.

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