Reverse engineering a forgotten 1970s Intel dual core beast: 8271, a new ISA
https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/11/reverse-engineering-forgotten-1970s.html
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The floppy drive controller chip costing and being better than the main CPU reminds me of some of my arduino projects.
For example I was driving a GSM Modem (over serial) which contained a comparatively advanced ARM SoC driving it.. from an AT Mega 8-bit micro that I was programming. It was great educationally, but kindof hilarious :)
I love these die shot RE walkthroughs. This is such a weird choice though; almost no one used this chip for production hardware. The WD 17xx series was the king of floppy controllers in the 70's and early 80's (well, if you ignore Woz's masterpiece, which was discrete logic).
Seems like if you're going to reverse an obscure chip, something with a more exotic application would have been more fun?