It's alive and kicking on the Texas Instruments DSP chips. You can get incredible performance out of them, but you pay with horrible compile times.
To give you a taste what these chips do:
- 64 registers, 8 execution units, so 8 instruction can execute per cycle. Each instruction executes in a single cycle but may writes back the result later (multiplications do this for example). It's your responsibility to make sure you don't generate a conflict.
- for loops the hardware has a very complicated hardware scheduling mechanism that effectively lets you split the instruction pointer into 8 different pointers, so you can run multiple instances of a loop at the same time.
I wrote assembler code for that. Sudoku is a piece of cake compared to it.