Peter,

You mean people want Win95?! :)

DXC inside a 8051
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The chip looks very nice. I like their crosspoint array to solve the pin hookups. That can even assist the board layout when the pinouts can be reassigned to untangle the trace topography. Its real power is in reconfiguring signal decoding.

Computational Secret Revealed
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The neat thing it revealed when they removed clock prescaler was how they did the DIV AB. Normally it appears as a 4 tick process like the MULT AB, but if you're familiar with chip design of multipliers and dividers, that was a bit of a puzzle. A hidden innovation?

The new spec reveals the ANSWER: it takes 8 ticks to do DIV AB and 4 to do MULT AB. The 8051 merely steals ticks on the normal 8051 to make it appear to take 4 ticks.

I spent a few nights on the drawing board trying to figure out how they had done that. :)

High Speed or Low Power
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I glanced through the spec when I got to the office this morning. I wanted to see how low the power consumption would go with a slow crystal running it at normal 12Mhz speed.

Wake up Incognito
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One application where this chip would be great is as a reconfigurable radio packet decoder sniffer/monitor. The crosspoints particularly would allow reconfiguring the decoding circuitry based upon the radio packet protocol attributes.

Things that I'd normally design reconfiguable upon the circuitboard could be done INTERNAL to this chip. That's very nice. :)

-Jay C. Box