It depends what you mean by "scale". If you mean "make it as big and as fast as possible" then yes, they suck because of the memory bandwidth thing. If you mea

It depends what you mean by "scale". If you mean "make it as big and as fast as possible" then yes, they suck because of the memory bandwidth thing. If you mean "can be rapidly deployed from bare metal to a rich and complex application stack" then they scale out quite well, because a stack-based architecture - or even an architecture that lends itself to implementing stack-based languages, like the Motorola 6809 - kind of points you in the direction of Forth, and once you've decided you're using Forth then you've only to write a few dozen lines of assembly and the rest of your Forth is written in Forth.