主题：凑个热闹，也来分析一下amd的geode转让 -- ragtime

Yes you are right, Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) remains as an independent company, licensing IPs to chip makers.

What intel really got was StrongArm, a member of ARM architecture, a joint work by ARM and DEC (another "who remembers this company") in the 90's which can be very roughly described as a "faster ARM". It grew out of a particular version of ARM (not the popular ARM7 as I remember). Intel bought the department making SA from DEC very cheaply unfortunatelly, as the result of a lawsuite. With it comes the rights to SA, and (that version of) the ARM architecture.

I would not call XScale a rebrand. Intel did produce SA (SA1110) for a while, and I believe ARM actually received loyalty from that. Later on Intel developed XScale as its next generation RISC product. XScale is actually a new architecture, with some DSP support which ARM chips usually do not have. But it is backwards compatible with SA and ARM instruction set as far as my experience can tell. Because of this, and ARM development tools usually work (but not optimized) for XScale chips as well, often XScale is considered as member of the ARM architecture family too.

ARM got its initial fame from Apple's Newton PDAs. ARM7 and SA are probably the most popular ARM chips, and now XScale is quickly replacing those. Today ARM architecture chips have more than 3/4 of the 32bit embedded CPU market, also more than 3/4 of RISC embedded chip market. It is the leading chip family for high end embedded devices such as PDAs and smart phones. Dragonballs are long gone.