[I think we are pretty far out in classiccmp land...] 

Michael Kukat writes:
> 
> I like the 8031, it is a quite nice microcontroller.  
>

Yup...I still have a pile of 8051 stuff I bang away on for little projects.  
Quirky as hell, and the thing that compiler writers nightmares are made of, 
but really a lot of fun to bit-bang on. 

> But i think the only real processor made by Intel was the i860 

Ack!  Did you ever try to program one of those things?  Tons of good ideas 
miserably implimented.  Impossible to keep the pipeline from stalling unless 
you did the whole thing in assembly language, and only then if you had the 
right kind of job and *really* knew what you were doing. 

You want to see how to do a vector processor right?  Look at a Cray, maybe a 
Cyber 205, not an i860. 

> (and the small brother, the i960), 

The i960 and the i860 where, AFAIK, completely unrelated architecturally. 

> the AMD29k had really a lot of registers (was it 384?), 

Different ones in the line had different numbers, but I think the 29000 had 
192. 

I always thought the RCA 1802 and the Signetic 2650 were kewl, too... 

Bottom line is that there have been vast numbers of interesting ideas in the 
past, will be more in the future, but there is really only room for a few 
big players. 

Ken Seefried, CISSP