Comment by imtringued 2 days ago
I honestly don't see the point. I personally would prefer a CPU architecture with as wide a memory bus as possible.
All the way to 16384 bit and at least 4, but preferably 16 cores, each core with at least 1 MiB of on chip SRAM.
Now that would be useful to me.
Faggin started the 4004 in '69 and Hoff was pushing off the bat for it to be more than a calculator chip so it could be used as a general purpose processor. So they might not have specifically been 'dreaming of controlling a toaster', they and others were clearly dreaming about similar control tasks, like printers. They wrote the history down, first person...you might check it out.
Or, gee, was the comment intended to tell us how you tied an onion to your belt in 1969 (which was the style at the time) and made toast as the good lord intended without any newfangled chips in the way, up hills both ways, and we should all get off your lawn? /s
You need 16 cores and 16MB+ of memory to control a toaster? A water heater? The washing machine? At the cheapest possible BoM and low power usage?
Because that's the kind of stuff an 8-bit micro does.