Hi Allison:
Thanks for taking the time to explain some of the past design issues and your involvement with them.?
Yea, lots of timing and bottle-neck issues for access to resources. Integrated circuit fabrication was still cutting its teeth back then, so things were slow but getting faster.
I think NATIONAL SEMI was one of the 1st to design a mutli-processor CPU arrangement using their INS8060 and INS8070 series SC/MP CPUs. I was lucky enough to have a friend (who used to work for QXI, a NATIONAL SEMI rep.) sample me an INS8073 with NS tiny BASIC built into RAM. It was literally my very first CPU board design (?.?
In the past decade, I've seen other projects with multiple 8051 cores blazing along at some 400 MHz as well (but not with 12 clock cycles per instr. cycle).
To think what you were doing 40 years ago has ALL been stuffed into single-chip "SoC's" (System on a Chip) with quad ARM cores, many megabytes of RAM and FLASH memory and lots of other peripherals happily running at 1200+ MHz (instead of 6 MHz!). Linux to the rescue for multiprocessing as the OS yielded us the (GOOGLE) "ANDROID" virtual JAVA machine user interface.
For certain, its been an interesting journey, the past few decades. In many ways, I miss the simplistic nature of computing from back then. :)
Peace and blessings,
Scott
