I remember attending a lecture given by Steve Furber in 1985 in Cambridge (UK) on the new chip that he and Sophie Wilson had developed. The emphasis then was on

I remember attending a lecture given by Steve Furber in 1985 in Cambridge (UK) on the new chip that he and Sophie Wilson had developed. The emphasis then was on having an affordable 32 bit rather than low power. It seemed incredible that such a small team could have developed a CPU at their first attempt that was faster than offerings from their much bigger competitors. Anyway much of the commercial success of ARM must be down to Robin Saxby who was ARM's first CEO. His interview with Charbax is fascinating [1]. He inherited a company with two customers, one of whom was failing, some interesting IP but not much else. He seems to have had a relentless focus on providing customers with what they needed - for example providing the Thumb 16 bit instruction set to reduce code size when potential customers such as Nokia were reluctant to move to 32 bit designs. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI