ARM250

Historia

Late in 1992, Acorn launched new budget machines - two more in the A3000 range (A3010 and A3020) and an A4000 which was a business oriented mini-A5000. The principal difference was a reduction of board complexity with Acorn/ARMs first foray into SoC (System-on-Chip) design in which the main components of the ARM chipset (ARM, MEMC, VIDC, IOC) were coupled together in one piece of silicon. As it happens, initial supply problems meant that early machines did not have an ARM250 but instead a mezzanine board containing the individual chips. An ARM250 is more or less an ARM3 without the cache, so it ought to be detectable by the lack of a cache but the support of SWP, though the mezzanine version may just behave like a marginally faster ARM2 machine. Clocking 12MHz, this SoC delivers around 7 MIPS.