(puts on chip designer hat) yes and no, as I said upstream the copyright laws of the time did not protect designs, chip copying (stealing) was rampant. I can i

(puts on chip designer hat) yes and no, as I said upstream the copyright laws of the time did not protect designs, chip copying (stealing) was rampant. I can imagine that some CPU designers from a particular world view (especially in the 70s) might only design in terms of microcode - but also design tools were pretty minimal, I can imagine that it might have been far easier to design things in terms of microcode rather than as PLAs - what you might be seeing here is the differences between different teams' in house custom tooling