What if?

[Joseph_21sv]

I have had a wacky-sounding idea for a parallel or alternate continuity microcomputer development might have been following. It goes like this: What if, at each time the data path width of motherboards would be going to double, there would have been some engineer making a design most likely based on twin copies of a CPU with a data path half as wide instead of any single CPU with a data path actually that wide? This might sound wacky on first thought because it amounts to using a chip which appears unnecessary, but on second thought it would have been (and may yet remain) reasonable when mass market motherboards would (and may yet) be going to double their data path width because those lower-bit CPUs were (or are) simply the more commonly known technology of the time, making it easier to find people to develop new software for the new platform or port existing software to it. Moreover, computers with 16-bit and higher motherboards have always used dedicated video RAM chips anyway in order to obviate the need for color attribute video modes and even some very early 8- and 16-bit CPUs are made from discrete chips, albeit ones less integrated than a lower-bit CPU, so why not suppose that there would be a parallel or alternate history of motherboard designs using discrete copies of a CPU to build up a data path wider than that of that particular CPU itself?
To start, we could suppose that this engineer does the most obvious thing and makes a design which is double a certain architecture known at the time, but more likely using dedicated video RAM chips and so not needing a higher resolution color attribute video mode if it is based on an early color computer.