Thank you for the explanation Jecel, that makes it look as though it was always destined to be in the 'coprocessor' domain.
How is the Smalltalk-to-hardware project coming along?
How is the Smalltalk-to-hardware project coming along?
But Intel realized that asking customers to jump from x86 to an incompatible architecture (either the i860 or i960) was too risky - they could just as well jump to a competitor's architecture instead. So they repositioned their RISCs as coprocessors. It is amazing that they forgot this not too many years later with the Itanium.
My Smalltalk processor project is going very well, though obviously this is not the place for details.