[rescue] Re: [geeks] THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK.

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001 ward at zilla.nu wrote:

> I'm anxiously awaiting acceptance of the Itanium because there's a good
> chance the availability and volume sales will push down the cost of HP
> CPUs to a more reasonable level.

CPU price in the workstation world is dwarfed by the rest of the system.
I doubt that nice HPPA boxes will be selling at bargain basement PC prices
anytime soon.

> On another note, does anyone else find it terribly funny that Intel's
> old powerhouse CPU, the i860, is now used as a motherboard chip?  I just
> assumed that it was a case of name reuse, but I've been told otherwise.
> Wow!  I remember loving that chip in both HP's graphics box and on a
> NeXTDimension.  Then the i960, its microcontroller cousin, was popping
> up in printers and copiers everywhere I looked.  Next thing you know,
> I'll find an 88110 in my refrigerator.

I've got an i960 in my switch.  I think that the 88k is enjoying wide
acceptance because National adopted a very liberal and affordable
licensing model.  I haven't seen nearly as many AMD 27k's lately, though
they're out there as well.

The i860 may have been fast for the time (esp the i860XP) but it was a
royal pain to pipeline code properly.  Great if you're doing matrix/vector
math where the loops can be hand optimized (no surprise that both SGI and
Sun used them in their graphics boards) but suboptimal otherwise (reminds
me of the MIPS R8000).

-James