ce, video, telemetry, speed, temperature, pressure, and SO on). At the same time, the devel- opment of sophisticated digital-processing methods, algorithms, and mathematical formulation tech- niques that could take advantage of this progress had already made their way to the classrooms and laboratories in engineering colleges in the late 1970s. This resulted in a new army of signal-process- ing engineers in the industry and academia. These engineers would rather use digital-processing tech- niques to solve a problem than tinker with older analog, essentially nonrepetitive, complicated, and sometimes half-baked solutions, which may or may not provide reliable and consistent results. Texas Instruments (TI), Motorola, and Analog Devices (and a plethora of less successful vendors) introduced multiple families and architectures for digital signal processors (DSPs).4 40,41 These sophisticated CPU-like chips that contained integrated circuitry to optimally and efficiently handle mathematical operations used in digital-processing algorithms in one single clock cycle-for exam- ple, the execution of Multiply-And-aCcumulate (MAC) operations like the ones used in digital filter- ing. DSPs and memory chips would now be integrated onto adapters and PCBs. A complete sophisticated DSP system could easily be developed, opening up horizons and possibilities for numer- ous new applications where classical CPUs could not have been envisioned. Although Intel adopted RISC techniques relatively early in some of its embedded processor prod- ucts (for example, i960), its bread-and-butter business involving CPUs (80286, 80386, Pentium, and SO on) for the PC platform continued to evolve in the CISC dimension. The RISC flag, however, among several less well-known names, remained on the masts of IBM, Sun Microsystems, MIPS, ARM, and Motorola. IBM took the principle further to the supercomputer arena with the design of the famous RS/6000 family. Some of the CPUs developed for that realm, in variations on a theme, have also ended up powering I