I don't mind admitting that I _lusted_ after a PC powered by an Alpha chip. All I knew is that spec-wise they seemed to blow Intel and Motorola out of the water

I don't mind admitting that I _lusted_ after a PC powered by an Alpha chip. All I knew is that spec-wise they seemed to blow Intel and Motorola out of the water. They were not too much pricier either. But alas, I was young, had no real £ of my own, so I could only dream. Eventually got an Atari STfm with a Moto 68k as that is what my folks could afford. Once something is baked into a CPU design that seems to be it forever alright, I take it that that's what you mean by technical debt. Besides, everybody up the stack (and that means everybody because you can't get much lower down the stack than the CPU) has got to re-tool. Mill Computing have been working on this for 12 years! Transmeta had Linus Torvalds for crying out loud. Best-in-the-world does not cut it when it comes to CPU design. Compatibility and small incremental logical changes seems to trump all. Or do what ARM are doing, as you say.