The main reason was to run Windows (3.1) inside a window on Risc OS in parallel. You could copy/paste between them too iirc. Use of floating point code from Risc OS was so non-uniform (i.e. the culture was rolling your own fixed point code) that any attempt to speed that up via offloading to another type of CPU would have only worked for a specific configuration of everything. The x86 cards available weren't exactly speed demons either.
At one time there was a lot more community excitement about shoving many Arms on a single board, or a DSP, but the StrongArm upgrade was already fast enough to oversaturate the bus making such a thing pointless.
Around this time Win95 overtook Risc OS in terms of realistic UX/cost as well.
With hindsight the Risc PC existed so there was an upgrade path for people from the Archimedes for particular software before ports of that to PCs were completed. e.g. Sibelius. Acorn knew they didn't have a chance.
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The main reason was to run Windows (3.1) inside a window on Risc OS in parallel. You could copy/paste between them too iirc. Use of floating point code from Risc OS was so non-uniform (i.e. the culture was rolling your own fixed point code) that any attempt to speed that up via offloading to another type of CPU would have only worked for a specific configuration of everything. The x86 cards available weren't exactly speed demons either.
At one time there was a lot more community excitement about shoving many Arms on a single board, or a DSP, but the StrongArm upgrade was already fast enough to oversaturate the bus making such a thing pointless.
Around this time Win95 overtook Risc OS in terms of realistic UX/cost as well.
With hindsight the Risc PC existed so there was an upgrade path for people from the Archimedes for particular software before ports of that to PCs were completed. e.g. Sibelius. Acorn knew they didn't have a chance.