[rescue] Compaq Proliant 8000

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 @ 13:21 -0400, Dave McGuire said:

> On Apr 28, 2004, at 11:53 AM, Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366 wrote:
> >>Hello all,
> >>  Here we go:
> >>  - a large Siemens 486 Tower (more or less backplane based)
> >>  - a Hauppauge 4860 system (80486DX/33 with i860/33 coprocessor)
> >
> >How do you program the i860?  Sounds yummy.
> >
> >The i860 was one of Intel's attempts to get away from x86, but it
> >failed.
> 
>   It failed?  They sold a metric buttload of them, and they were used 
> in all sorts of applications.  Same with the i960.  Same with about 
> 5-10 other architectures.

It failed perhaps because it had enough problems that it didn't make
it in its target market.  Of course, are we really sure what Intel was
targeting?

My company tried to get around i860 problems by using it as a
co-processor and avoiding interrupts (among other things).  It
was treated as a vector processing system, and it worked OK for
that.  Basically this was designed to be a realtime data aquisition
supercomputer.  Record your data and process it on-the-fly, instead of
recording it and shipping it off to a supercomputer center.

>   Saying it "failed" because it never became their biggest seller is 
> like saying every other model of car from Ford "failed" because it 
> didn't out-sell the Escort.

Probably depends on how you view it.  I don't think Intel really was
targeting the embedded market, but that seem to be the only place it was
a success.

The other day I took apart some old Alphas and other systems from
salvage, and there were tons of networking, SCSI, and video controllers
using i860.




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shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["People should have access to the data which
you have about them.  There should be a process for them to challenge any
inaccuracies." -- Arthur Miller]