The ARM2 wasn't tremendously different from the ARM1. And the ARM was the major differenciator for their products, unfortunately. It was the beating heart of t

The ARM2 wasn't tremendously different from the ARM1. And the ARM was the major differenciator for their products, unfortunately. It was the beating heart of the Archimedes and RISC PC and the one differenciator they had. Because the MEMC and VIDC weren't, and RISC OS, however nice it might've been, was hobbled by a bunch of early design issues that kept it from making the transition to preemptive multitasking. Never mind the pain of the ARM26 to ARM32 transition. I mean, I could go on. ARM gets credit for being the first properly successful RISC processor, way beyond what MIPS and POWER achieved. It proved that RISC worked by delivering powerful machines that consumed a fraction of the power. They didn't need to be first to do that, they just needed to do it better. The first person to do something is rarely the one to get credit because they probably didn't get the design right. Acorn didn't get it quite right, but they got it right enough to make major waves. And as much as he deserves respect, Seymour Cray wasn't the progenitor of RISC. If anything, his designs ran contrary to them as he was so fixated on building machines with essentially discrete logic.