A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip
One of the interesting things about the ARM instruction set (at least in the Acorn era - not sure if this is still true of more recent ARM iterations) is that ALL instructions, not just branch, were conditional, which meant that you could avoid the need for branch instructions in some cases - rather than conditionally branch past some instructions, just make them conditional and "execute" them regardless. Smaller code and faster execution!<p>The article cites Hermann pushing IBM's RISC approach, but as I recall (I worked at Acorn at the time) the inherently RISC-like simplicity of the 6502 that Acorn was using was itself part of the inspiration.