[rescue] sparc10 cpu - what to do.

[Josh Snyder]

On 12/19/2016 10:49 AM, Andrew Jones wrote:
> On 12/18/2016 02:03 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
>> I don't know if i860 was overall profitable for Intel or not; that
>> would be my measure of success for the program.
>>
>> When they got the StrongARM/Xscale deal from Digital they seemed to
>> have replaced the i860 with the ARM based chips.
>>
>
> Are you sure you're not thinking of the i960?  The i960 was a RISC chip
> that had a long, healthy life in embedded applications.  RAID
> controllers, network control planes, etc.
>
> The only things I ever heard of using the i860 were Intel's own
> supercomputer product, and the most expensive NeXT graphics option.

The i860 is also notable for being the original for target for what 
became windows NT.  But iirc some in Intel planned for the i860 to be 
the replacement for x86.  The i860 at the time had great performance on 
paper.  But just like the itanic compilers were not able to generate 
code that could even come close to the theoretical performance of the 
chip.  Has there been any VLIW architecture that has been successful as 
a general purpose CPU?

I also seem to remember there being something really bad about context 
switching with the i860.  I think the i960 only shared the general 
naming scheme with the i860.  I saw quite a few i960 as co-processors in 
networking equipment in the mid-late 90's.

		Josh