[rescue] Sun 711

[Chris Byrne]

Well the i860 itself may not be in production, but its still in some
relatively new storage gear (a no-name RAID 5 storage array, a year or two
since manufactured, dunno when designed).

Intel has a habit of popping out one MASSIVE prod run at EOL and selling
chips out of that batch forever. They still have ppro's left fer chrissakes.

And yes I know what the i960 is. I've had raid cards based on it. I know the
difference between the 860 and the 960.

Oh and the 860 was introduced in '89. A lot of professional grade equipment
will keep the same design for YEARS, so I wouldn't say the 860's validity
died 10 years ago.

There's a few companies out there making vector processing engines TODAY
with the 860. I was looking for 860 applications and apparently these
companies are still in production. There were also several high end memory
and I/O controllers for testing machines and other industrial applications.
There were also video processing boards and frame grabbers. I even saw a
laser printer listed as having an i860 in it. Most of the applications I saw
were using the proc as an I/O controller of some sort, either video, memory,
or storage.

Remember just because something isn't ideal, or doesn't even make since for
a job doesn't mean that people wont use it for that job.



Chris Byrne



> -----Original Message-----
> From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
> Behalf Of Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez
> Sent: 02 May 2002 19:01
> To: rescue at sunhelp.org
> Subject: RE: [rescue] Sun 711
>
>
> On Thu, 2 May 2002, Chris Byrne wrote:
>
> > Nope, not confused here. The i860 is still in production for use in many
> > embedded systems, and is used in quite a few storage and I/O products.
>
> That is the i960. The i860 is a totally different family and it is not
> very "emeddeable" really. the i860 production stopped long ago, the i960
> might still be on production but I think intel was moving towards ARM for
> embedded.
>
> > It's also used in some digital audio equipment and other DSP gear, and
> > bunches of other stuff.
>
> In older equipment perhaps the i860 as a DSP stopped making sense almost a
> decade ago.