RMA is a three step algorithm. It is using "background noise removal" which is in fact some convolution algorithm that produce lower values than signal values itself. Then it does quantile normalization and log2 transformation. You can then subtract two values (from two arrays) and obtain a guess of the log fold change.
If you somehow shuffle three steps of RMA, you get slightly different results. Commercial softwares often implements RMA directly using code of R. Irizarry from Bioconductor. Thus the implementations of RMA should be the same and they probably do not shuffle anything.
RMA algorithm is defined as a 3-step process of:
If you drift from this, then it is not RMA.
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