[samlittlewood]

ARC had been split out into Argonaut Technology Ltd. long before Argonaut Software hit the buffers.

The success of the SuperFX chip opened doors for future work, but nothing from the SuperFX was carried over - it was 16 bit, with a compact instruction encoding, a gate level design using ECAD.

A string of graphics hardware projects followed with a wide range of requirements, targeting 'interesting' (ie: cheapest) processes/standard cell libraries. These were all VHDL, and a flexible 32 bit embedded risc control processor emerged as a common theme.

The configurability and robustness in the face of sketchy ecad toolchains made it a very saleable thing in it's own right.