[rescue] Apple WWDC Summary, Cube Computers

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 04:03:02PM -0500, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> > The i860 is probably going to be the easiest of that generations chips
> > to still use, but even so...
>
> Wasn't Intel talking up a planned i860-based PC at one point, as the
> successor to the 486?  I remember reading about it at the time,
> comparing the specs on the CPUs, and realizing that the i860 would
> have the potential to totally blow the 486 and the 68000 out of the
> water.

Having potential to do something and actually doing it are two very
different things. The i860 was a pretty shitty chip, as with most intel
processors until the P6 and excluding the 960 IMHO, the architecture was
pure and utter crap, since they totally disregarded the programming model
(same thing with the Itanium IMHO). So the peak numbers were pretty good,
but the real performance was pretty bad. Alas intel marketing gave the
whole cray on a chip myth wings. So to this day, the whole thing still
endures.

I say this wile looking at the VME board with 12 i860s in front of me :)