After testing all available processors and finding them lacking, Acorn decided it needed a new architecture. Inspired by papers from the Berkeley RISC project, Acorn considered designing its own processor. A visit to the Western Design Center in Phoenix, where the 6502 was being updated by what was effectively a single-person company, showed Acorn engineers Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson they did not need massive resources and state-of-the-art research and development facilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
ARM processors are what's in our cell phones, set top boxes, tablets, e-readers, etc...
Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced as of 2017.
IBM's choice of the 8088 processor for their Personal Computer, and a disk operating system purchased from Microsoft (which Microsoft had bought in turn from someone else) was a horrible catastrophe, a monkey wrench in human technological progress we still haven't recovered from.
The Apple Macintosh, which used the complex instruction set 68000 microprocessor, was a similar rat's nest of arbitrary, capricious, and unmaintainable code, no better than the PC.
The
Apple IIGS was an evolutionary step beyond RISC-like 6502 architectures using the Western Design Center 65C816, the 6502's direct successor mentioned an the excerpt above, but Apple eventually killed it in favor of the Macintosh.
Current x86 processors respect the original 8088 family's complex instruction sets which eventually became quite hairy with "multimedia" and memory management functions, etc. (everything and the kitchen sink too!), but internally they are now developed more along the lines of RISC machines, including actual ARM and similar RISC cores overseeing sleeping and waking states, security, and digital rights management in the difficult to secure x86 environment.
Heh, how's that for nerd?
= new reply since forum marked as read