ARM as a descendant of 6502???

I think not ... ARM relies on a limited instruction set with limited addressing modes.

The greatest power of the 6502 was in its range of addressing modes.

Another interesting feature was that, while it was timed and equipped similarly to the Motorola series of processors, it used Intel-style byte order, i.e. low-byte, high-byte, rather than Motorola's high-byte, low-byte order. This allowed the CPU to fetch an 8-bit value as an immediate, or an offset, as many processors did, and it also allowed arithmetic, e.g. indexing to take place concurrently with a high-byte fetch, which saved a cycle in a frequently used instruction.

While I'm not personally aware of the exact hardware details of the internals of the 6502, I believe this was done in order to allow the CPU to use its ALU for both operand and address arithmetic and do so in a time-efficient manner. That, in turn, made for a complex ALU, but saved all the logic required to make A, ABH, ABL, PC, SP, IX, and IY loadable synchronous up/down counters rather than simply memory locations in a small internal RAM buffer. The product of that was a really small bit of silicon, rather than the considerably larger ones used in the MC680x, and Z80, its main competitors, and when you're in the silicon-by-the-pound business, that's a tremendous advantage.

Rather than making the silicon efficient, the ARM people have focused on making the features desirable. They sell IP, not silicon. They have different goals.

RE