Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Additional Processors - Computerphile" video.

@gordonrichardson2972 The 486SX was a completely cynical marketing ploy. It lacked the (functioning) floating-point hardware, but you could buy a 487SX chip to add this. However, the 487SX was more than just a floating-point coprocessor: it was actually a complete functioning CPU. Plugging it in caused the 486SX to turn itself off and hand over all functions to the 487SX!
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8:56 One of those “couple of other things” in the Amiga was the Copper. This implemented display lists, which allowed it to do fancy animation effects without actually needing to blit large arrays of pixels around. Now that was impressive.
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6:09 Actually that was done using fixed-point (scaled-integer) calculations. Which were quite a pain to work with, but saved on floating-point hardware. As the hardware cost dropped, eventually it got to the point where the saving from leaving floating point out was negligible compared to the cost of programming without it. This was about the early-to-mid-1990s.
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8:24 The trouble with the hardware blitters in the Amiga and Atari ST is that they were never as powerful or flexible as software. The Macintosh had its QuickDraw graphics routines, which implemented sophisticated drawing modes and nonrectangular clipping. When you tried to build similar functionality on top of a more limited hardware blitter, the performance would often end up worse than if it was all done in software.
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Phosphoric acid dissolves your teeth!
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7:35 Presenter points finger at one of an array of a dozen nondescript-looking chips. Audience nods sagely.
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@rasz It was never just about Intel. Unix workstations used quite a wide variety of chips then -- MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, SPARC, HP-PA etc.
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