Behind the scenes of every chipmaker, there’s a set of instructions that dictates how their products will function. Over the last three decades, Arm has become the dominant company making this chip architecture, and it powers nearly every smartphone today. Apple bases its custom silicon for iPhones and MacBooks on Arm, and now Nvidia and AMD  are reportedly making Arm-based PC chips, too.

Arm’s blockbuster IPO in September valued it above $54 billion, thanks in part to the growing list of companies choosing Arm over Intel ’s rival x86 architecture.

The UK-based company sells licenses for its chip architecture to companies that make central processing units, or CPUs. It also collects royalties on every chip shipped with its technology. Haas says that number topped 30 billion last year. Its customers are the biggest names in tech and chips, including Apple, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Arm enables chips to use less power than those made with x86. Lately, it’s seen a big surge in adoption.

Arm is the basis for Apple’s custom processors, which have replaced Intel chips in Macs. Amazon Web Services bases its custom server chips on Arm. Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon chips are also Arm-based, and getting ready to make a meaningful move into the PC market.

Arm has some 6,800 patents worldwide, with another 2,700 applications pending. Some of those are for Arm’s Neoverse line for high-performance and cloud computing, which has helped it break into AI since its launch in 2018.

One risk, longer term, may come from a free, open-source rival architecture called RISC-V. It’s seen a recent surge in backing from some of Arm’s big customers like Google, Samsung and Qualcomm, which may have been seeking alternatives when it looked like Nvidia was going to buy Arm. Shorter term, x86 remains its main competitor, especially in servers.

Apple is the big partner helping Arm break into the laptop market. Apple moved to its own Arm-based processors in Mac computers in 2020, breaking away from the Intel x86 processors that had powered them for 15 years.

In October, Apple announced its latest line of M3 processors and the MacBooks and iMacs running on them. Apple said Arm-based M3 gives the newest MacBook up to 22 hours of battery life. In September, Apple extended its deal with Arm through at least 2040.

On October 11, Patently Apple posted a report titled " Qualcomm introduces new 'Snapdragon X' branding for next-gen PC platforms that are designed to challenge Apple's M-Series powered Macs." Qualcomm's new chip from their Nuvia team is based on Arm and will make a huge impact in the PC sector beginning in H2-24.

For more on this, read the full report by CNBC's Katie Tarasov.