alt Hacker News> The AMD Am29000 processor came out in 1987, also announced as the world's fastest processor (do you see a meme here?) and it could process one instruction every cycle, so indeed it was fast.
The AMD 29k - the fastest CPU you never heard of? No, seriously, I am quite interested in computer hardware, and Computer Architecture by Patterson/Hennessy was required reading during my studies, but I can't say I ever heard of this CPU architecture, which is "based on the seminal Berkeley RISC" (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am29000). And it seems to have been quite widely used, but not in an actual computer (except for this one)...
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Yep, it wound up as the main CPU in a bunch of laser-printers, as well as Apple's 8*24GC QuickDraw accelerator card for the Macintosh, and as part of the flight-control computer on Boeing 777s, among many other embedded system designs.
It's the 'other' major processor that shipped with register windows along with SPARC and i960. Very popular in the embedded world.
This is because history gets written by the victors.
You might have heard of the x86 cpu the AMD K5 that competed against the Pentium?
Well that was basically an am29000 but with an x86 instruction decoder front end. The architecture was that good it was competitive 10years later.
Think of the am29000 as an incredibly influential research project that flowed into all of AMDs future CPUs in some way or another.