[musicale]

Personally I can find something to like in most architectures.

Cell (for example) was an asymmetric/hybrid multicore CPU; Apple Silicon is perhaps a modern example of asymmetric performance vs. efficiency cores, and also features special-purpose accelerator cores such as the neural engine.

The 432 had capability-based addressing. Speed-over-security has had a good run, but with some disastrous consequences. We may be seeing the return of capabilities with CHERI/ARM.

The 960 was an early superscalar design, supported tag bits, and was also a successful product.

[chasil]

Obligatory mention:

"RISC instruction sets I have known and disliked."

https://www.jwhitham.org//2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-ha...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607119

I might also say that Sun's UltraSPARC was constantly beaten by Fujitsu SuperSPARC. It would have been better to outsource.

[pinewurst]

SuperSPARC was an earlier TI manufactured part. Fujitsu was (and I think still is) SPARC64, which was a nice series of parts, originally designed by HAL. I used to own a Fujitsu server - fast and built like a brick outhouse.