> Acorn was well-suited to design a RISC CPU since the chip they were most familiar with, the 6502, is often said to be a sort of proto-RISC design. I keep on

> Acorn was well-suited to design a RISC CPU since the chip they were most familiar with, the 6502, is often said to be a sort of proto-RISC design. I keep on hearing this claim, and I still don't buy it. The 6502 was not "proto-RISC". It was a pretty traditional accumulator design, with an instruction set which lacked most of the typical features of a RISC design like minimal addressing modes (6502 had plenty of weird modes, 65C02 added even more) or general-purpose registers (6502 had only A, X, and Y, all of which were special-purpose to some degree or another). Plus, the 6502 was hardly unique on the market. It was nearly a clone of the Motorola 6800, and wasn't all that far off from the Intel 8080 or its clone, the Z80.