My oh my, how people have short memories
ARM may now be synonymous with Intel, but it is still an independent company... and was once a privately owned British company. ARM stood for Acorn RISC Machines and was a project of Acord, back in the time when acorn were making the Archimedes series of computers - nice machines... They changed their name to Advanced RISC Machines and became a separate company.
Their processors were used in the Apple Newton - remember them? - the psion series 5, and all sorts of things, including the Empeg MP3 car player. It's reckoned that 75% of 32bit embedded processors are ARM designs.
DEC worked with ARM to produce the StrongARM design, which got passed to Intel as part of a lawsuit settlement
(I'm not sure whether ARM still collects royalties, I guess so...
) and begat the XScale chip.
It's all good stuff, and all traceable back to the company that gave us the Atom, BBC B, and the Electron
(computer, not particle...
)
I used to sell Archimedes stuff in my part time job as a student. RISC OS was pretty nice, but of course not a patch on the Amiga
(cue flame war
)
Edited by chiark 2005-06-28 3:52 AM
