On this day ten years ago, the first prototype StrongARM processor card was powered up by Acorn engineers. The experimental kit managed to run at a cool 228MHz, running software nearly six times faster than the 40MHz ARM710 processors used in RiscPCs at the time. The card, which drew one watt of power, would later go on sale in September 1996.

interesting... It was at 11.12am on March 26 1996 that boffins working for Acorn`s technology division, ART, switched on the pre-production StrongARM chips from Digital Semiconductor. In February 1995, Digital licensed the blueprints of the ARM processor designs to produce a family of high performance 32 bit RISC chips. The move came about the time electronics industry analysts began realising that the ARM architecture was ready to take off in a big way. A year later in 1996, Digital presented the SA-110 StrongARM to makers of PDAs and set top boxes with predictions that they will sell billions of the new processor by the end of the century.

Digital later handed over the StrongARM designs to Intel as part of a lawsuit settlement; the architecture was then grown into the XScale family by Intel, who at the time fancied the idea of using RISC ARM-compatible processors for particular applications.

technical history of Acorn Computers

http://www.mcmordie.co.uk/acornhistory/