I recall the low end of the IBM 360 line (the Model 30) used a similar arrangement, using an 8-bit ALU to execute a 32-bit ISA via microcode emulation. Yeah...

I recall the low end of the IBM 360 line (the Model 30) used a similar arrangement, using an 8-bit ALU to execute a 32-bit ISA via microcode emulation. Yeah...it was slow.