Sophie Wilson (the designer of the original ARM instruction set) said this when asked which CPU architecture she admired:
Sophie Wilson, chief architect of ARM and more recently of the Broadcom FirePath
October, 2001
Primarily the 6502. I learned about pipelines from it (by comparison with the 6800) and its designers were clear believers in the KISS principle. Plus the syntax of its assembler and general accessibility of it from the machine code perspective. I can still write in hex for it - things like A9 (LDA #) are tattoed on the inside of my skull. The assembly language syntax (but obviously not the mnemonics or the way you write code) and general feel of things are inspirations for ARM's assembly language and also for FirePath's. I'd hesitate to say that the actual design of the 6502 inspired anything in particular - both ARM and FirePath come from that mysterious ideas pool which we can't really define (its hard to believe that ARM was designed just from using the 6502, 16032 and reading the original Berkeley RISC I paper - ARM seems to have not much in common with any of them!). And clearly the 6502's follow-up, the 65816, wasn't "clean" any more, so whichever of Mensch and Moore contributed what to the 6502, Mensch by himself was a bit at sea.
Biggest object lesson was, however, National Semiconductor's 32016 (aka 16032): this showed how to completely make a mess of things. The 32016 first exposed the value of memory bandwidth to Steve Furber and I, showed how making things over-complex led to exceedingly long implementation times with loads of bugs in the implementation, and showed that however hard you tried to approach what compiler writers claimed they wanted, you couldn't satisfy them (no, I never did use a VAX). And an 8MHz 32016 was completely trounced in performance terms by a 4MHz 6502...
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Sophie Wilson (the designer of the original ARM instruction set) said this when asked which CPU architecture she admired:
Sophie Wilson, chief architect of ARM and more recently of the Broadcom FirePath October, 2001
Primarily the 6502. I learned about pipelines from it (by comparison with the 6800) and its designers were clear believers in the KISS principle. Plus the syntax of its assembler and general accessibility of it from the machine code perspective. I can still write in hex for it - things like A9 (LDA #) are tattoed on the inside of my skull. The assembly language syntax (but obviously not the mnemonics or the way you write code) and general feel of things are inspirations for ARM's assembly language and also for FirePath's. I'd hesitate to say that the actual design of the 6502 inspired anything in particular - both ARM and FirePath come from that mysterious ideas pool which we can't really define (its hard to believe that ARM was designed just from using the 6502, 16032 and reading the original Berkeley RISC I paper - ARM seems to have not much in common with any of them!). And clearly the 6502's follow-up, the 65816, wasn't "clean" any more, so whichever of Mensch and Moore contributed what to the 6502, Mensch by himself was a bit at sea.
Biggest object lesson was, however, National Semiconductor's 32016 (aka 16032): this showed how to completely make a mess of things. The 32016 first exposed the value of memory bandwidth to Steve Furber and I, showed how making things over-complex led to exceedingly long implementation times with loads of bugs in the implementation, and showed that however hard you tried to approach what compiler writers claimed they wanted, you couldn't satisfy them (no, I never did use a VAX). And an 8MHz 32016 was completely trounced in performance terms by a 4MHz 6502...
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.h...
details of the thinking process of evolving from 6502 to ARM in this interview.
https://youtu.be/QqxThgLTLyk
And, yes, striking similarity is not the best way to say it.