I was once in a congress, where one of the first developers of ARM was there and told the history of the company. And I perspicuously remember he saying "at the beginning was all about money, every little transistor was important, every transistor less, was a cheaper system. The same savings in money where the key to later be able to do low power processors, because is basically the same optimization"

So sorry, but I have to partly disagree, they did.

Edit: Interesting... sharing what the designer of the first ARM core said leads to downvoting in HN...HN is a very different place as it used to be...