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A comment on Companies that had successful pivots. Parent comment

Re:Companies that had successful pivots by mattbee on Friday December 31, 2021 @08:43AM (#29747953)
Pivot is a bittersweet description, and ARM was a new spin-off founded in 1990 alongside Apple. Acorn renamed itself to Element 14 Ltd in 1998 and sold off the assets from their home computer business. They built DSL kit for a couple of years before ending up as part of Broadcom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_14_(company)

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Re:Companies that had successful pivots by the-dude on Friday December 31, 2021 @10:12AM (#29748703)
What is interesting too is that none of the other microcomputer manufacturers of the time tried to create their own CPU.

We have IBM + the rest of the mainframe guys and Sun.

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Re:Companies that had successful pivots by mattbee on Friday December 31, 2021 @10:41AM (#29749002)
Not that it helped Acorn survive, of course! Right up until the end, RISC OS ran on interrupts, too much delicate kernel code, cooperative multitasking, and unprotected memory.

They weren't the only CPU pioneers; Argonaut didn't think it unreasonable to create a custom CPU to push polygons on a Nintendo cartridge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX

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Re:Companies that had successful pivots by the-dude on Friday December 31, 2021 @11:04AM (#29749266)
The Super_FX seems to be a coprocessor. More companies created silicon ( Commodore? ), but not CPUs AFAIK.
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Re:Companies that had successful pivots by mattbee on Friday December 31, 2021 @12:33PM (#29750266)
It was a whole new RISC CPU. Lots of co-processors are whole CPUs. Argonaut spun a company off, and it's still shipping - the inventor said it outsold ARM and MIPS before the PS1 (from https://web.archive.org/web/20071217092221/http://www.armcha... )
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Re:Companies that had successful pivots by easrng on Friday December 31, 2021 @12:39PM (#29750343)
Didn't Element 14 manufacture Raspberry Pis at some point?
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