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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.

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

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.
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... )