Thanks. I will definitely look into these when I have the time. I'm actually a grad student in EE but this topic interests me. Maybe I can get something published on hardware accelerated GCs... one day!
Personally, I would call it hardware-assisted gc if we consider hardware acceleration to be things like GPUs, crypto accelerators, etc.
You're right that starting with a simple architecture makes things much easier. 8086 for example operated in 16-bit real mode (segmented memory), and so the memory layout was trivial compared to 32-bit protected mode in x86.
I haven't taken any graduate architecture courses yet, but my assumption that they would go into more detail on the development of CPUs through history.