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Pivot is a bittersweet description, and ARM was a new spin-off founded in 1990 alongside Apple. Acorn renamed itself to Element 14 Ltd in 1998 and sold off the
by mattbee 5y ago
Pivot is a bittersweet description, and ARM was a new spin-off founded in 1990 alongside Apple. Acorn renamed itself to Element 14 Ltd in 1998 and sold off the assets from their home computer business. They built DSL kit for a couple of years before ending up as part of Broadcom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_14_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_14_(company)
- the-dude 5y agoWhat is interesting too is that none of the other microcomputer manufacturers of the time tried to create their own CPU. We have IBM + the rest of the mainframe guys and Sun.
- mattbee 5y agoNot that it helped Acorn survive, of course! Right up until the end, RISC OS ran on interrupts, too much delicate kernel code, cooperative multitasking, and unprotected memory. They weren't the only CPU pioneers; Argonaut didn't think it unreasonable to create a custom CPU to push polygons on a Nintendo cartridge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX
- the-dude 5y agoThe Super_FX seems to be a coprocessor. More companies created silicon ( Commodore? ), but not CPUs AFAIK.
- mattbee 5y agoIt was a whole new RISC CPU. Lots of co-processors are whole CPUs. Argonaut spun a company off, and it's still shipping - the inventor said it outsold ARM and MIPS before the PS1 (from https://web.archive.org/web/20071217092221/http://www.armchairempire.com/Interviews/jez-san-interview.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20071217092221/http://www.armcha... )
- easrng 5y agoDidn't Element 14 manufacture Raspberry Pis at some point?