No, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 was more interesting.
It was just a low end, low power CPU. It ran standard X86 code, and I had Linux running on it. I'd say it was still not ideal, as the system I had had a CPU fan and the inside of the case got pretty hot. I recall the CPU supported crypto and RNG acceleration, which I think was a nice and fairly rare feature at the time.
Other than that, VIA's hardware sucked. The CPU is unimpressive and the board I got had an embedded NIC that corrupted network packets. That one was fun to figure out.
Edit: also the "cool chip in a can" packaging from one of the contemporary computer conventions. And possibly the mini-ITX era was also kickstarted with a C3-powered motherboard, I think...?
Unfortunately I developed a searing hatred of VIA hardware back then. Besides the slow CPU and buggy board, I also managed to run into the SB Live + VIA chipset = disk corruption issue.
By the way, it's interesting to read the iAPX 432 architecture paper along with the Case for RISC paper, since the 432 paper argues the exact opposite. Essentially, due to increasing software costs, you should put as much as possible into hardware. The semantic gap between hardware and programming languages should be minimized by implementing high-level things such as objects and garbage collection in hardware, which they call the Silicon Operating System. The instruction set should be as complete as possible, with lots of data types.
I should also mention that the 432's instructions were not byte-aligned: they were anywhere from 6 to 321 bits long. Just decoding the instructions took a complex chip, with a second chip to run them. This is the opposite of the RISC idea to make instruction decoding as simple as possible.
The paper says, "The iAPX 432 represents one of the most significant advances in computer architecture since the 1950s."
http://www.bitsavers.org/components/intel/iAPX_432/171821-00...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AS/400
Of course Java provided a similar architecture in many ways on a mainstream architecture the same way that Common Lisp made Lisp machines obsolete. Java never really got a universal architecture for serialization and persistence the way the AS/400 did.
That said, I find AVR-8 pretty interesting in that it is the last 8-bit architecture and is, from the viewpoint of the assembly programamer, technically superior to all those machines I had or craved in the 1980s.
RISC-I probably hadn't been written about publicly when he submitted that paper.
'RISC I: A Reduced Instruction Set VLSI Computer' appeared in May 81
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/800052.801895
(and of course the original RISC paper was even earlier in 1980)
The iAPX 432 paper in June 82:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/641542.641545
I should add that I only skimmed the 432 paper for references so I might be wrong on that!
It's pretty ballsy of Intel's marketing department to so blatantly lie to your face like that. Maybe they were big believers of the "Big Lie" rhetorical device? If you say something so outrageous people are less likely to question it because you must be a genius with loads of inside knowledge to assert something so completely crazy on the face of it.