A more appropriate title, and actually from the article, may be: "Weird and Innovative Chips".<p>Loved this post, anyways. I think it's important to look at radical and strange computing paradigms from the past, even if their DNA is not obviously in today's mainstream architectures.
Other interesting systems worth poking your nose into are the c.mmp and cm* architectures developed in the '70s at Carnegie-Melon. Also ncube.<p>IIRC c.mmp was a multi-cpu-multi-memorybank setup where any cpu could connect to any memorybank via a crossbar switch. cm* was (I think) some sort of multi-cpu-multi-memory architecture with a packet switched bus as interconnect.<p>They all predate any possibility of being 'chips', so by that criterion wouldn't have qualified for this article/book, but nevertheless are probably still interesting.
Found a few posters on the history of computing:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000407" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000407</a>
I'm really hoping someone builds von neumann's harmonic integration computer someday. It was patented after his death.<p>Feels like a better bet than quantum computing, but what do I know?<p><a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065705" rel="nofollow">https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065705</a>
The AMD 29000 series really should rate a mention in such an article:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Am2900_and_Am29000_families#Am29100" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Am2900_and_Am29000...</a>
One wonders if some of these designs might make a comeback as Moore's law slows down.<p>For the longest time, processor performance was dominated by who had the best manufacturing process or, more recently, who could keep up best with fab's updating processes.
Interestingly enough, the AT&T Hobbit processor was used in the original BeBox which ran BeOS (Which we discussed the other day.) Though only about 30 machines were made and were only used for internal development.<p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/kdanvers2002/43385092882" rel="nofollow">https://www.flickr.com/photos/kdanvers2002/43385092882</a>
I was not impressed by the i432 architecture. Like the Multibus, it seemed to be trying to be very fancy, but with no elegance or taste. The result was an architecture that... um... might possibly have worked. It's still an ugly, tasteless architecture, though.