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Actually power efficiency was a side effect of having a straightforward design in the first ARM processor. The BBC needed a cheap (but powerful) processor for the Acort computer and a RISC chip was When ARM started testing their processor, they found out it draw very little power...

... the rest is history.

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You're getting your history mixed up.

Acorn won the bid to make the original BBC home computer, with a 6502-based design.

Acorn later designed their own 32-bit chip, the ARM, to try to leapfrog their competitors who were moving to the 68000 or 386, and later spun off ARM as a separate company.

The BBC Micro had a 6502

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