Sophie Wilson discusses it here[1] but I've read it in other places too. You'll have to find them yourself though.

> The second thing they didn’t do was that they weren’t fast, they weren’t easy to use. We were used to programming the 6502 in the machine code and we rather hoped that we could get to a power level such that if you wrote in a higher level language you could achieve the same types of results. So you could write 3D graphics games. You could do whatever you wanted to do without having to go all the way down to assembly language and for these processors that were on sale at the time that wasn’t true. They were too slow. So between the two things we felt we needed a better processor.

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

▲

klelatti 3 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the quote which is very interesting. Not being pedantic but this isn’t quite what your original comment said. Sophie is saying ‘same type’ of results and not having to use assembly for certain applications which doesn’t imply that BASIC on ARM would be faster than 6502 assembly just that it was fast enough for their purposes.

I think it’s possible that some applications would be faster - floating point for example due to the ARM’s 32 bit registers and the 6502’s lack of even 16 bit arithmetic - but probably not in general.

	▲	TheOtherHobbes 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You have to remember these 1980s processors were ridiculously slow by modern standards, and "same type of results" implies a ballpark goal that was impressively aspirational on its own terms. The details of "Does that mean the same speed, or faster?" weren't really relevant, because the speed difference was anywhere between 10X and 100X - which was an astounding, if rather fuzzy, target. ARM 1 got surprisingly close to that out of the gate, with the added benefit of being unexpectedly power efficient.