ARM is announcing that CEO Warren East is stepping down after nineteen years at the company, making way for new CEO Simon Segars — the company's current president. The succession will happen on July 1st of this year, 12 years after East took charge. Even though ARM doesn’t produce devices (or even chips) of its own, the processor architecture it designs provides the foundation for the vast majority of mobile SoCs on the market, from the likes of Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and many others.

The 45-year-old Segars is a bona fide hardware guy

Unlike East, whose background was in operations, the 45-year-old Segars is a bona fide hardware guy who served as VP of Engineering on some of ARM’s early processor designs. To hear him discuss what he thinks of Intel’s competing mobile architecture, multiple cores, and the future of mobile computing, take a look at our interview from 2012, below.