"I believe it was designed to run Ada"
Yep. That was in the days when Ada was going to displace Pascal, and with the backing of the DoD, take over the world. Maybe even literally. A nice feature was it's ability to increase performance by just adding more function units. Unfortunately, as you note, it was starting from a fairly low point. I got the manuals around here somewhere...
It's a telling point that the iAPX432 had the full backing of Intel, until the moment it didn't. There were follow on versions so there was an upgrade path, at least on paper. And then it was gone.
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