[geeks] just to stir things up, a few predictions

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 21:30:10 -0400
  Dave Fischer <dave at cca.org> wrote:

> Everything I've seen about the history of the i860 
>suggests
> that the original design was as a high-end embedded math
> processor, and only when they started selling did 
>someone in
> marketing decide to push it as a general purpose 
>processor.

Hum, interesting. As far as every manual and literature, I 
have seen on the architecture, seem to indicate IMHO that 
it was supposed to be a pretty powerful general purpose 
scalar machine. In fact the addition of a 3D unit was 
because Intel envisioned the chip as a general purpose 
desktop chip, so they wanted to integrate as many 
functions as they could. Why? Because the 860 and 486 
shared the same fab process (which is what intel exceeds 
at) and they had a budget of over 1M transistors, since 
they did not have the overhead of the x86 control logic 
they could add a more refined FPU and GFX unit. No one was 
offering a chip with so many transistors at the time. I 
believe it was also one of the first chips to have 
significant amount of L1 cache on die.

Since if far more programmable than a DSP and more complex 
than the 960, I dunno if I think the 860 was intended as 
an embedded part from the get go. Although intel did not 
have any DSP offering, so maybe they were trying to kill 2 
bids with one shot.

The only machines with the 860 as a general purpose 
processor I have seen were some weird systems from OKI, 
stardent, alliant and the paragon from intel. The rest I 
have seen as part of either a vector unit, or gfx 
accelerator (Reality Engine, DEC stuff, NeXTDimension, 
etc).

> I think Motorola expected Sun to jump on when they 
>started
> the 88000, but it took so long to finish, Sun was 
>already
> shipping SPARCs by the time it was ready.

Well, I read articles from the mid 80s in which sun 
considered the SUN3 as a stopgap before they introduced 
their SUN4 which was supposed to be their real interest, 
with the SPARC design from the get go. AFAIK Joy was 
somewhat involved in bringing a bunch of people from the 
RISC group at Cal over to SUN to develop SPARC and that 
was early on the company's history. So I do not know if 
they ever considered the 88K. Although I could be wrong, 
so if you know something in that respect that'd be cool to 
know.

Only DG, Philips in Europe, and Omron in Japan released 
88K systems. Most of the 68K vendors, and they seem to 
have been legion in the 80s, went somewhere else. So that 
was kind of a big foobar on Motorola's part.

I believe NeXT had a 88K NeXTStation prototype. I saw a 
couple of pictures of it, and it looked remarkably like a 
PlayStation2 :).


> Yeah - it's an interested and famous dead architecture. 
>I
> expect i432, Symbolics, PDP10, & Multiflow threads pop 
>up now 
> and then as well..

I tend to enjoy that much more than all the politics that 
seem to pop up in this list every now and then to tell you 
the truth.