https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/chip-hall-of-fame-acorn-computers-arm1-processor
Unsatified with the processors then available on the market, the Acorn engineers decided to make the leap to creating their own 32-bit microprocessor. ARM1 was released in 1985.
They called it the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM.
In 1990, Acorn spun off its ARM division, and the ARM architecture went on to become the dominant 32-bit processor for embedded application: More than 10 billion ARM cores have been used.
Today that ARM division is big. In electronics design IP industry still has only one big company: ARM isdominating mobile phone circuits and dominates nearly half of IP sales (ARM’s sales were nearly $ 1.65 billion, or 48.4 percent of the total market).
1 Comment
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Acorn Archimedes At 30
http://hackaday.com/2017/07/17/the-acorn-archimedes-at-30/
The trouble with being an incidental witness to the start of something that later becomes world-changing is that at the time you are rarely aware of what you are seeing. Take the Acorn Archimedes, the home computer for which the first ARM processor was developed, and which has just turned 30. If you were a British school pupil in 1987 who found a pair of the new machines alongside the row of BBC Micros in the school computer lab, for sure it was an exciting event, after all these were the machines everyone was talking about. But the possibility that their unique and innovative processor would go on to spawn a line of successors that would eventually power so much of the world three decades later was something that probably never occurred to spotty ’80s teens.
Reason for ARM (Acorn Archimedes at 30) – Computerphile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh7kpkwXnwA