ISRG vs ARM Comparison

Intuitive Surgical develops, produces, and markets a robotic system for assisting minimally invasive surgery. It also provides the instrumentation, disposable accessories, and warranty services for the system. The company has placed more than 9,500 da Vinci systems in hospitals worldwide, with more than 5,500 installations in the US and a growing number in emerging markets.

Arm Holdings is the IP owner and developer of the ARM architecture (ARM stands for Acorn RISC Machine), which is used in 99% of the world's smartphone CPU cores, and it also has high market share in other battery-powered devices like wearables, tablets, or sensors. Arm licenses its architecture for a fee, offering different types of licenses depending on the flexibility the customer needs. Customers like Apple or Qualcomm buy architectural licenses, which allows them to modify the architecture and add or delete instructions to tailor the chips to their specific needs. Other clients directly buy off-the-shelf designs from Arm. Off-the-shelf and architectural customers pay a royalty fee per chip shipped.