Sophie Wilson, the architect of the first ARM processor, was inspired by the engineers working on the successor to the 6502 at the Western Design Center. They proved that a small team can build a simple microprocessor which is competitive with a microprocessor (like the x86 processors) built by an army of H-1B-visa engineers with a budget of billions of dollars.

So, Wilson and the other 2 engineers (Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser) on her team designed, built, and tested the first ARM processor. Its simplicity gave it 2 additional characteristics: low power consumption and ease of testing. These 2 characteristics would, decades later, pave the way for ARM to enter the market for laptops, desktops, and supercomputers.

ARM will appear in Apple laptops and desktops in late 2020.

As of today, Fugaku, a supercomputer built by Fujitsu, is powered by ARM processors and is the fastest supercomputer in the world.

Wilson and her 2 British colleagues, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser, deserve the Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering. This prize is the engineering equivalent of the Nobel Prize. These engineers have done for computing systems what Claude Shannon did for communication systems.

In an opinion piece published by the New York Times, an economics professor at Yamanashi Gakuin University (in Japan) confirms what American intelligence officers already know. Specifically, the Chinese habitually conceal the truth.

The professor explains how behavior which is endemic in Chinese culture facilitated the coronavirus' spreading beyond the borders of China. He wrote, "As far as the current outbreak goes, two cultural factors help explain how the natural occurrence of a single virus infecting a single mammal could have cascaded into a global health crisis. And now for the controversial aspect of this argument: Both of those factors are quintessentially, though not uniquely, Chinese.

The first is China's long, long history of punishing the messenger [who warns of danger or government corruption]."

Beijing should subsidize the development of the home-testing kits because Chinese culture is the catalyst for spreading the coronavirus.

In an opinion piece published by the New York Times, an economics professor at Yamanashi Gakuin University (in Japan) explains how behavior which is endemic in Chinese culture facilitated the new coronavirus' spreading beyond the borders of China. He wrote, "As far as the current outbreak goes, two cultural factors help explain how the natural occurrence of a single virus infecting a single mammal could have cascaded into a global health crisis. And now for the controversial aspect of this argument: Both of those factors are quintessentially, though not uniquely, Chinese.

The first is China's long, long history of punishing the messenger [who warns of danger or government corruption]. ...

A second cultural factor behind the epidemic are traditional Chinese beliefs about the powers of certain foods, which have encouraged some hazardous habits [that facilitate a virus' hopping from a wild animal to a human host]. ..."

The ARM processor, which is the dominant microprocessor for low-power devices, is an indirect descendant of the 6502.

An insightful report by The Register explains, "[Sophie] Wilson's affection for the 6502 also took them, in October of 1983, to the Western Design Centre in Phoenix, Arizona, where Bill Mensch was working on a version of the chip that would support 24-bit addressing.

The place was a revelation. As [Steve] Furber recalls: 'We went there expecting big shiny American office buildings with lots of glass windows, fancy copy machines... And what we found was... a bungalow in the suburbs... Yeah, they'd got some big equipment, but they were basically doing this [enhanced 6502] on Apple IIs.' ... As Wilson tells it: 'A couple of senior engineers, and a bunch of college kids... were designing this [enhanced 6502] thing... We left that building utterly convinced that designing processors was simple.'

Simple? IBM's own commercially unsuccessful first attempt at a Risc processor had taken months of instruction set simulation on heavy mainframes. Wilson, however, just plunged right in. Herman Hauser remembers: 'Sophie did it all in her brain.'"

In other words, the visit to the Western Design Centre, where the enhanced 6502 was being developed, helped Sophie Wilson to realize that a simple yet powerful processor can be designed and implemented by her small team of 3 engineers. She did not need the army of H-1B visa holders that Intel uses. She and her 2 British colleagues (Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser) were sufficient if she made the instruction set architecture (and its implementation) simple.

A benefit of simplicity is low-power consumption. The first incarnation of ARM consumed so little power that it could operate with only the leakage current of the logic circuit to which it was attached.

Another perspective of 6502 and ARM appears in the transcript of an interview with Sophie Wilson.