For Acorn, this chip really helped to bring costs down for the A30x0/A4000 machines - the Electron of the Archimedes era. The RiscPC equivalent was the A7000/A7000+ with the ARM7500/ARM7500FE, the FE being novel for the inclusion of the FPU which ARMs had traditionally not included.
The ARM7500FE is considerably slower (in terms of clock speed) than a StrongARM, but the FPU apparently makes StarFighter 3000 run very well.
StrongARM with an FPU would have been incredible, however no FPU option exists for the RiscPC. There was a commercial software package that would allow the FP capabilities of the 486/586 copro to be used from RISC OS, but I'm not sure how effective it was.
Comments
So much history here for me.
One landmark buried in there was the ARM 250 chip based machines.
I think they were some of the first system on a chip desktop computers.
They lacked the glamour of the Arm 3 based machines launched around the same time but really they were ground breaking.
I think it was possibly the first to go into a desktop computer.
ARM250 datasheet here: https://home.marutan.net/arcemdocs/ARM250.pdf
For Acorn, this chip really helped to bring costs down for the A30x0/A4000 machines - the Electron of the Archimedes era. The RiscPC equivalent was the A7000/A7000+ with the ARM7500/ARM7500FE, the FE being novel for the inclusion of the FPU which ARMs had traditionally not included.
The A7000s sort of passed me by as I had a RiscPC at the time (which predicatably I really regret selling).
I always wanted an FPU for my RiscPC, do you know how much difference they made day to day?
The ARM7500FE is considerably slower (in terms of clock speed) than a StrongARM, but the FPU apparently makes StarFighter 3000 run very well.
StrongARM with an FPU would have been incredible, however no FPU option exists for the RiscPC. There was a commercial software package that would allow the FP capabilities of the 486/586 copro to be used from RISC OS, but I'm not sure how effective it was.