[EAR]
You've got a point...
Well, really, they do -- but they had a much more compelling point when the Cold War came with an unlimited budget.
but I don't think it's really economical to build that kind of hardware into general-purpose processors.
Economical? The marginal cost of adding even nutso new features in silicon now for mass-market chips is pretty close to zero. Indeed, if you're in the speech recog or 3D imaging games (i.e., things that still tax a PC), Intel comes around *begging* for new ideas to use up all their chip real estate. The only one I recall them turning down was a request from Dragon's founder to add an instruction that, given x and y, returned log(exp(x)+exp(y)). They were skeptical, and turned out even *we* didn't need it <wink>.
You end up with a camel. You know, a horse designed by committee?
Yup! But that's the camel Intel rides to the bank, so it will probably grow more humps, on which to hang more bags of gold.