I think it's fair to say when the Acorn team were considering what to replace the 6502 with the chips they compared with were the 68000, 32016 and 80286 - and t

I think it's fair to say when the Acorn team were considering what to replace the 6502 with the chips they compared with were the 68000, 32016 and 80286 - and they felt in each case that memory bandwidth was the constraining factor. In the end the Arm1 with 29,000 transistors had performance that was as good as or exceeded the 68020 with 200,000. Incidentally, Robin Saxby the first CEO of Arm previously worked for Motorola and tried to sell the 68000 to the Acorn team!