As the article notes, the ARM v1 CPU had 27,000 transistors. Designing a RISC processor that small is hard in a different way. It’s probably similar to designi

As the article notes, the ARM v1 CPU had 27,000 transistors. Designing a RISC processor that small is hard in a different way. It’s probably similar to designing a useful CAD application whose code fits in 30 kilobytes on an operating system which only provides file I/O. (That would be the original AutoCAD.) The difficulty of both hardware and software has changed towards dependency management rather than squeezing the most out of a handful of transistors or program bytes. There’s no reason for anyone to create ARM v1 or AutoCAD 1.0 today.