[rescue] i860 Success

[Janet L. Campbell]

On Wed, 28 Apr 2004, Gerhard Lenerz wrote:

>   maybe my view is a bit distorted but I remember that lots of CA
>   books covered the CPU architectures of the "RISC days" almost
>   equally. If the i860 was an attempt to build another RISC approach
>   for a general purpose CPU beside MIPS, SPARC and later PA-RISC it
>   probably failed in that area.

This is how I see it.  Intel pushed the Paragon as their flagship, and 
even the boost from going from the XR to XP chips couldn't save it.  They 
were indeed very tough to optimize for.

A *lot* of the architecture was exposed in the instruction set, which made 
it good for embedding in high speed peripherals, but not so good for using 
in a general purpose computer.

The i960 was vastly different and was specifically designed for embedded 
applications.  It was a lot simpler to integrate.

-Janet