Do I need to? StrongARM is pretty much the definition of an "also-ran" product, no? It had no particularly notable design wins, and while it sold in reasonable volume was a distant second to MIPS in the "consumer junk" segment[1]. DEC unloaded it to Intel, where it becamse Xscale, and Intel dumped it on Marvell. At no point did anyone really care much about it.
Even within the ARM world itself, it was ARM Ltd's CPU cores (also Qualcomm had some decent designs) that powered the architecture's way back to relevance on phones, out of which Apple would grow to dominate.
That's a little unfair. StrongARM did well in the WinCE market (which I assume you are referring to as 'consumer junk') and did very well in the embedded market especially as Xscale over several generations (PXA, IOP, etc). As an embedded chip with a relatively short lifespan that's reasonably impressive.
However, the idea that somehow it (or any of it's contemporary ARM kin) could somehow 'replace SPARC and save Sun Microsystems'...well, that's just laugh out loud silly.
Do I need to? StrongARM is pretty much the definition of an "also-ran" product, no? It had no particularly notable design wins, and while it sold in reasonable volume was a distant second to MIPS in the "consumer junk" segment[1]. DEC unloaded it to Intel, where it becamse Xscale, and Intel dumped it on Marvell. At no point did anyone really care much about it.
Even within the ARM world itself, it was ARM Ltd's CPU cores (also Qualcomm had some decent designs) that powered the architecture's way back to relevance on phones, out of which Apple would grow to dominate.
[1] Set top boxes, cable modems, stuff like that.