Great! I was trying to remember the model name of this processor the other day in a conversation, and no amount of googling could bring it up, all my results were swamped by all the new AI-du-jour chips everyone is working on. The young person I was talking to could not believe there was a neural network chip in the 90s and looked at me like I was having some kind of memory issue.

I remember the 80170 just not getting that much attention when it came out, at the time I was just out of high school, hammering away on Turbo C++ and working through the third volume of Parallel Distributed Processing and thinking to myself, "someone should make a chip that does this" and then eventually reading about the 80170 having come and gone. I vaguely recall a demo where they would quickly flash NIST digits at the chip and it could recognize them with high speed and accuracy.

I think what maybe killed the effort was the extreme pace of Moore's law at the time, made a NN chip more efficient than software? No biggie in 8 months we'll just double the density and speed of the current x86 chip and beat it in software. There's probably also the extreme internal competition in Intel to kill anything that might even vaguely threaten x86.

Anyway, good flashbacks. I should dig up my copy of PDP, I remember skimming over the second volume on biological models and I think at this stage in my life that might be the most interesting.