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The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design that Changed the World
**A Financial Times Best Summer Book 2023**
Out a gripping look at the rise of the microchip and the British tech company behind the blueprint to it all.
'A gripping and inspiring read.' Sir James Dyson
'A revealing and insightful biography of the company whose blueprints define the digital world.' Chris Miller, author of CHIP The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
'[A] sparkly corporate biography.' Financial Times
__________
One tiny device lies at the heart of the world's relentless technological the microchip. Today, these slivers of silicon are essential to running just about any machine, from household devices and factory production lines to smartphones and cutting-edge weaponry.
At the centre of billions of these chips is a blueprint created and nurtured by a single Arm.
Founded in Cambridge in 1990, Arm's designs have been used an astonishing 250 billion times and counting. The UK's high-tech crown jewel is an indispensable part of a global supply chain driven by American brains and Asian manufacturing brawn that has become the source of rising geopolitical tension.
With exclusive interviews and exhaustive research, The Everything Blueprint tells the story of Arm, from humble beginnings to its pivotal role in the mobile phone revolution and now supplying data centres, cars and the supercomputers that harness artificial intelligence.
It explores the company's enduring relationship with Apple and numerous other tech titans, plus its multi-billion-pound sale to the one-time richest man in the world, Japan's Masayoshi Son.
The Everything Blueprint details the titanic power struggle for control of the microchip, through the eyes of a unique British enterprise that has found itself in the middle of that battle.
__________
Out a gripping look at the rise of the microchip and the British tech company behind the blueprint to it all.
'A gripping and inspiring read.' Sir James Dyson
'A revealing and insightful biography of the company whose blueprints define the digital world.' Chris Miller, author of CHIP The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
'[A] sparkly corporate biography.' Financial Times
__________
One tiny device lies at the heart of the world's relentless technological the microchip. Today, these slivers of silicon are essential to running just about any machine, from household devices and factory production lines to smartphones and cutting-edge weaponry.
At the centre of billions of these chips is a blueprint created and nurtured by a single Arm.
Founded in Cambridge in 1990, Arm's designs have been used an astonishing 250 billion times and counting. The UK's high-tech crown jewel is an indispensable part of a global supply chain driven by American brains and Asian manufacturing brawn that has become the source of rising geopolitical tension.
With exclusive interviews and exhaustive research, The Everything Blueprint tells the story of Arm, from humble beginnings to its pivotal role in the mobile phone revolution and now supplying data centres, cars and the supercomputers that harness artificial intelligence.
It explores the company's enduring relationship with Apple and numerous other tech titans, plus its multi-billion-pound sale to the one-time richest man in the world, Japan's Masayoshi Son.
The Everything Blueprint details the titanic power struggle for control of the microchip, through the eyes of a unique British enterprise that has found itself in the middle of that battle.
__________
423 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 11, 2023
41 people are currently reading
366 people want to read
About the author
James Ashton
21 books4 followersLibrarian Note:
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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
March 20, 2024
身為晶片麻瓜的我看完以後，腦子有點渾沌，以下是我理解的內容：簡單來說，安謀前身是艾康電腦（Acorn），當時Acorn內部研發出精簡指令集，又叫做Acorn RISC Machine（ARM）；後來Acorn營運不佳，ARM受Apple與VLSI科技資助成為獨立子公司，也就是現在看到的安謀。安謀研發的晶片架構特色是：低價、低耗電、高效能，更特別的是他們本身不製造晶片，而是將晶片架構授權給各公司、賺取授權費用，晶片公司可在既有架構上研發改良、並縮短開發週期。也可以說跟台積電一樣身處在「科技界的瑞士」，因此在手機、電腦、汽車、工業感測器、資料中心等，安謀的晶片架構無所不在。當初在手機正要起飛的年代，安謀透過德儀對Nokia授權，賺進了第一桶金。而在非Jobs主政時期所研發的Apple Newton PDA也採用了ARM架構，雖然這項產品很短命，但在後來Jobs主導的Apple，iPod和iPhone還是選用了ARM架構，這兩件事情是我印象最深刻的。如何從差點就要倒掉的公司，到現在無所不在的安謀生態圈，以及近年被軟銀收購、輝達嘗試從軟銀收購失敗、和最終在納斯達克上市，就是這本書所要闡述的故事。
老實說看完了有點困惑，那種困惑是感覺作者想好好寫安謀的歷史，可是不知道為什麼又突然歪去寫了晶片大環境的故事，然後又寫了很多別家公司的事；途中可能想一想有點不太對勁、又拉回來寫了一點安謀，就這樣來來回回的無法聚焦主軸，因此真正談論安謀的篇章其實不多。所以要看晶片歷史的，建議看「晶片戰爭」就足夠了；但如果要看安謀歷史的，這本可能會微失望。
老實說看完了有點困惑，那種困惑是感覺作者想好好寫安謀的歷史，可是不知道為什麼又突然歪去寫了晶片大環境的故事，然後又寫了很多別家公司的事；途中可能想一想有點不太對勁、又拉回來寫了一點安謀，就這樣來來回回的無法聚焦主軸，因此真正談論安謀的篇章其實不多。所以要看晶片歷史的，建議看「晶片戰爭」就足夠了；但如果要看安謀歷史的，這本可能會微失望。
December 28, 2025
A great glide through computers since childhood in the 70's. Nostalgic and accurate.
October 25, 2023
If you want to know how the world’s most successful semiconductor designer bestrides the world stage, you need only read The Everything Blueprint, James Ashton’s recently published history of Arm.
It will help you understand the intricate network of technology companies that hold the world’s electronic keys in their hands.
Subtitled ‘The Microchip Design that Changed the World’, James – one-time city editor and executive editor at the Evening Standard – tells the story of how Arm emerged haphazardly from Acorn Computers and became the world-beating go-to company for computer chip design.
The story is a must-read because it showcases not just the start of a single company, but the beginning of a whole new way of doing business – way less confrontational, far more collegiate. After Arm, businesses always need to keep the bigger picture in mind. And it turns out the bigger picture is very big indeed.
“The microchip stakes a claim among centuries-old breakthroughs – making fire, handwriting, the wheel, the compass – that have transformed how humans live and learn,” we read.
The incredible pace of development takes place so rapidly, The Everything Blueprint reads like a thriller. For many years Arm was the David to Intel’s Goliath, and how that was turned around is both elegant and enthralling. The author has a great eye for snappy sentences, such as: “The ISA (instruction set architecture) is a kind of digital-era Ten Commandments.”
What happened was a combination of factors. Intel – brash, super-confident, hyped-up – came up with the ‘Intel Inside’ slogan which worked, up to a point. What Arm did was work behind the scenes, selling semiconductor designs to hardware manufacturers so they could play around with them in-house before sending the design off to a foundry. That way they could add their own features, take ownership of the design. No one knew where Arm designs had been used – they didn’t need to know. Everyone was happy, and no one got egg on their face.
“In the battle for mobile leadership, a loose alliance of developers had won out over Intel’s imperial invincibility,” writes James.
There’s a bit of luck too. It turned out the journey of diversification from being a smartphone chip designer to a laptop chip designer was easier for Arm than it was for Intel, which was switching from laptops into smartphones. And joining forces with Apple during Steve Jobs’ historic second tenure was incredible for both parties.
By the time anyone noticed, Arm was way down the road, and surfed the Softbank deal and the NVIDIA saga with aplomb.
“By creating an industry standard, just as its creators had dreamed of in 1990, Arm had put itself at the centre of the ultimate ecosystem,” writes James.
But – and it’s hard to overstate this – Arm has achieved its mission many times over by not making any serious enemies.
One of many hugely insightful remarks made by contributors to this book is Peter Wennink, chief executive at ASML, who puts it thus: “Powerful partnerships are not founded on power, but on capability, trust, transparency, reliability and a fair share of risks and rewards.”
As the story moves beyond creation mode into global player territory, the author outlines the challenges the sector faces. The first is the possibility – actually a policy – that China will invade Taiwan. “US intelligence believes that Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has ordered the country’s military to be ready by 2027 to annex Taiwan,” according to a recent Guardian report.
This would, as the author explains, mess with the world’s foundries – the colossally expensive machinery that manufactures the chip designs. With Taiwan producing more than 60 per cent of the world’s semiconductors and over 90 per cent of the most advanced ones, the US is, as James explains, now building its own foundries – and facing considerable challenges.
Another threat to Arm described in The Everything Blueprint is the tiny number of atoms now available inside the chip for further features. A semiconductor chip today is like a tower block that has had endless floors added, with ever longer and wider balconies, until the whole structure can’t take any more development. He suggests that maybe Moore’s Law – that the number of transistors that can be fabricated on an integrated circuit doubles every two years – may now be breaking down, flattening the growth curve for smartphones, laptops, tablets – and Arm’s profitability.
Time will tell. Meanwhile, Arm’s IPO has been a huge success. But deep inside The Everything Blueprint, James Ashton – who has had incredible access to get this astonishing book into print – quoted an Arm insider on the rationale for Arm choosing the Nasdaq route back for its second IPO.
“We saw being on Nasdaq like being at the Olympics,” said Jonathan Brooks, who became Arm’s finance director in March 1995, “while being on the LSE was more like being at the Commonwealth Games.”
Arm’s teams really do think further ahead than the rest of the pack, and The Everything Blueprint takes you on that incredible journey.
It will help you understand the intricate network of technology companies that hold the world’s electronic keys in their hands.
Subtitled ‘The Microchip Design that Changed the World’, James – one-time city editor and executive editor at the Evening Standard – tells the story of how Arm emerged haphazardly from Acorn Computers and became the world-beating go-to company for computer chip design.
The story is a must-read because it showcases not just the start of a single company, but the beginning of a whole new way of doing business – way less confrontational, far more collegiate. After Arm, businesses always need to keep the bigger picture in mind. And it turns out the bigger picture is very big indeed.
“The microchip stakes a claim among centuries-old breakthroughs – making fire, handwriting, the wheel, the compass – that have transformed how humans live and learn,” we read.
The incredible pace of development takes place so rapidly, The Everything Blueprint reads like a thriller. For many years Arm was the David to Intel’s Goliath, and how that was turned around is both elegant and enthralling. The author has a great eye for snappy sentences, such as: “The ISA (instruction set architecture) is a kind of digital-era Ten Commandments.”
What happened was a combination of factors. Intel – brash, super-confident, hyped-up – came up with the ‘Intel Inside’ slogan which worked, up to a point. What Arm did was work behind the scenes, selling semiconductor designs to hardware manufacturers so they could play around with them in-house before sending the design off to a foundry. That way they could add their own features, take ownership of the design. No one knew where Arm designs had been used – they didn’t need to know. Everyone was happy, and no one got egg on their face.
“In the battle for mobile leadership, a loose alliance of developers had won out over Intel’s imperial invincibility,” writes James.
There’s a bit of luck too. It turned out the journey of diversification from being a smartphone chip designer to a laptop chip designer was easier for Arm than it was for Intel, which was switching from laptops into smartphones. And joining forces with Apple during Steve Jobs’ historic second tenure was incredible for both parties.
By the time anyone noticed, Arm was way down the road, and surfed the Softbank deal and the NVIDIA saga with aplomb.
“By creating an industry standard, just as its creators had dreamed of in 1990, Arm had put itself at the centre of the ultimate ecosystem,” writes James.
But – and it’s hard to overstate this – Arm has achieved its mission many times over by not making any serious enemies.
One of many hugely insightful remarks made by contributors to this book is Peter Wennink, chief executive at ASML, who puts it thus: “Powerful partnerships are not founded on power, but on capability, trust, transparency, reliability and a fair share of risks and rewards.”
As the story moves beyond creation mode into global player territory, the author outlines the challenges the sector faces. The first is the possibility – actually a policy – that China will invade Taiwan. “US intelligence believes that Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has ordered the country’s military to be ready by 2027 to annex Taiwan,” according to a recent Guardian report.
This would, as the author explains, mess with the world’s foundries – the colossally expensive machinery that manufactures the chip designs. With Taiwan producing more than 60 per cent of the world’s semiconductors and over 90 per cent of the most advanced ones, the US is, as James explains, now building its own foundries – and facing considerable challenges.
Another threat to Arm described in The Everything Blueprint is the tiny number of atoms now available inside the chip for further features. A semiconductor chip today is like a tower block that has had endless floors added, with ever longer and wider balconies, until the whole structure can’t take any more development. He suggests that maybe Moore’s Law – that the number of transistors that can be fabricated on an integrated circuit doubles every two years – may now be breaking down, flattening the growth curve for smartphones, laptops, tablets – and Arm’s profitability.
Time will tell. Meanwhile, Arm’s IPO has been a huge success. But deep inside The Everything Blueprint, James Ashton – who has had incredible access to get this astonishing book into print – quoted an Arm insider on the rationale for Arm choosing the Nasdaq route back for its second IPO.
“We saw being on Nasdaq like being at the Olympics,” said Jonathan Brooks, who became Arm’s finance director in March 1995, “while being on the LSE was more like being at the Commonwealth Games.”
Arm’s teams really do think further ahead than the rest of the pack, and The Everything Blueprint takes you on that incredible journey.
October 30, 2023
I was hoping for a detailed biography of ARM, but this book spends more time on the wide tech landscape, especially the recent us/china geopolitical pissing match. This adds greatly to its length, without really delivering on the promise.
It feels like the author was broadsided by Chris Millers recent Chip Wars title, to the point that The Everything Blueprint is basically Chip Wars, with a hundred pages detailing the beginning, end, but oddly little of the middle of ARMs 30 year story.
It feels like the author was broadsided by Chris Millers recent Chip Wars title, to the point that The Everything Blueprint is basically Chip Wars, with a hundred pages detailing the beginning, end, but oddly little of the middle of ARMs 30 year story.
December 30, 2024
THE EVERYTHING BLUEPRINT is an illuminating case study of how one British semiconductor and software design company – Arm Holdings – infiltrated billions of households, workplaces, and vehicles with its proprietary processor designs since its founding in 1990. Author James Ashton, a British financial journalist, leverages mostly public articles to trace how Arm’s chip design architecture gained such wide adoption in modern computing and consumer electronics, competing against the likes of the incumbent semiconductor stalwart Intel. Ashton describes the origins of Arm’s licensing model, whereby its simplified and power-effect chip design instruction set was licensed to a wide array of corporate partners such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and even Intel, giving the company the moniker “the Switzerland of semiconductors.” Beyond this, THE EVERYTHING BLUEPRINT is more than a corporate history of Arm; it casts a much wider net, capturing the origins of the microprocessor, globalization of modern microchip manufacturing and design, the development of consumer electronics and mobile computing, the rise and fall of Intel, competition with China, and the role of the data center market in the AI race. As such, the book should be perceived as a soup to nuts history of semiconductors through the modern day, with Arm-based processors at the heart of that evolving technology ecosystem.
August 4, 2023
This book mixes two related topics: the evolution over the last 30 years of the microchip industry and the story of the origins, development, growth and success of ARM, the Cambridge headquartered designer of RISC processors, which has become the standard for many applications where power consumption is more important than performance.
The sectorial description is good, but doesn't match Chris Miller's 'Chip War'. But the story of ARM is a gripping one. I actually knew the story quite well having co-authored a pedagogical case study about it. But the deep insights Ashton has in the evolution of the company over the last 33 years have helped me understand even much better the struggles ARM had to go through, the base of its success (the partnerships in its business ecosystem), the role it has played in the development of the sector as a whole and ultimately the development of a very successful hi-tech company in the UK.
Anybody who has some interest in entrepreneurship, business history, industrial policy and the role of silicon chips in the recent development of the world will enjoy reading this book.
The sectorial description is good, but doesn't match Chris Miller's 'Chip War'. But the story of ARM is a gripping one. I actually knew the story quite well having co-authored a pedagogical case study about it. But the deep insights Ashton has in the evolution of the company over the last 33 years have helped me understand even much better the struggles ARM had to go through, the base of its success (the partnerships in its business ecosystem), the role it has played in the development of the sector as a whole and ultimately the development of a very successful hi-tech company in the UK.
Anybody who has some interest in entrepreneurship, business history, industrial policy and the role of silicon chips in the recent development of the world will enjoy reading this book.
March 23, 2024
ARM has been a big part of my life for more than 25 years now, so it was fun to read about how it all started. The tales of corporate shenanigans over the years were also fun. I feel like the author was overly ambitious in not only wanting to tell the story of ARM, but also place it in context in the global technology industry. To this end, we also get the stories of companies like TSMC, ASML, Apple, TI, and many others. I think it would have been better to dig more into the story of ARM and leave those other stories for another work. In the end, it was still an interesting book, and well worth reading if you are interested in computing.
August 12, 2023
This is a book about the microchip business. It does talk about Arm but it spends a lot of time on the broader historical sweep too. It is very much about the business and not the tech. It discusses a little on how Arm makes blueprints for microcircuits, but doesn't go into great detail on that. For me, the tech is the interesting part and the business story comes across as a little flat. A good read, still.
July 21, 2025
A disappointing read.
Given the number of senior Arm employees and ex-employees listed in the acknowledgements I was expecting a more in depth overview of the company history and decisions taken - and yet for me, everything covered appeared to be public knowledge from various previous news articles.
There is also a significant amount of coverage of other companies and events which while might be somewhat related do dilute the main topic and could be described as padding.
Given the number of senior Arm employees and ex-employees listed in the acknowledgements I was expecting a more in depth overview of the company history and decisions taken - and yet for me, everything covered appeared to be public knowledge from various previous news articles.
There is also a significant amount of coverage of other companies and events which while might be somewhat related do dilute the main topic and could be described as padding.
March 17, 2024
Nice book about ARM and semiconductor in general
I’ve read many others books as I’m an insider to the domain and reading this though will not learn much, but still lot of wonderful stories to hear
A must read for semiconductor lovers
I’ve read many others books as I’m an insider to the domain and reading this though will not learn much, but still lot of wonderful stories to hear
A must read for semiconductor lovers
April 9, 2024
Good risk for understanding current word around chips
This is a very informative book. Nowadays, controversy With regard to chips are everywhere. To know the basic history of chip development is essential. this book will help you have basic knowledge about its history.
This is a very informative book. Nowadays, controversy With regard to chips are everywhere. To know the basic history of chip development is essential. this book will help you have basic knowledge about its history.
January 19, 2025
This is a blockbuster, all stars book to cherish for ages. Possibly the best tech book in recent past. What a story, the breadth and canvas on which the narration occurred for spellbinding 391 pages!
August 7, 2023
Timely and highly readable story of a leading company in an important industry.
November 23, 2023
Interesting topic. Learned about the role of chips & the companies involved in its supply chain - a bit too dryly written with lots of unneeded information.
November 22, 2024
Better read Chip War by Chris Miller
August 13, 2024
I wanted to like the book but it lacked direction. While sold as a book about ARM around 30-40% is spent on the wider industry and the geopolitics involved, which Chip War has already done.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews