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.
> Well that was basically an am29000 but with an x86 instruction decoder front end.
Sad. A 29K saddled with an ugly and kludgy ISA.
Wow, I wasn't aware of that either! I didn't have an AMD K5 PC, but (IIRC) a K6-III - did that still have the same underlying architecture?
> Well that was basically an am29000 but with an x86 instruction decoder front end.
The K5 was based upon a 29K-family design, but it was actually an un-released superscalar project code-named "Jaguar", rather than just a 29K with an x86 decoder.