The StrongARM was a DEC-designed offshoot of ARM which (amongst other things) traded off some of the low power consumption of ARM for greater performance. The last-generation Acorn computer (the RiscPC) had swappable processor cards and Acorn more-or-less force-fit the SA110 into the last generation of RiscPCs because it was so much faster than the ARM8 that was in the roadmap. There were a bunch of software incompatibilities, partly because it used a different ISA (ARM v4 instead of the v3 used by the CPUs on the existing cards) and partly because it had separate instruction and data caches that broke a lot of existing self-modifying code. An Acorn application note with differences is online[0].
Honestly, those of us with StrongARMs were prone to showing off about it because it was such a speed upgrade over the existing machine. I didn't acquire mine until 1999, well after the whole Acorn ecosystem was obsolescent, but I might well have put it in my sig anyway...
Honestly, those of us with StrongARMs were prone to showing off about it because it was such a speed upgrade over the existing machine. I didn't acquire mine until 1999, well after the whole Acorn ecosystem was obsolescent, but I might well have put it in my sig anyway...
[0]: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/AN/295...