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Re: i860 on Bitsavers

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>The i860 was not a success (compared to the hype).  New
>implementations would have been a hard sell to everyone: Not only
>prospective customers, but also Intel management.

Part of the problem was that it was hard to get the high performance
other than in hand-crafted loops.  But a lot of it was that the
interrupts and system interface were awful, leading to speculation
that it was supposed to be a graphics chip that was turned into
a general purpose CPU late in the design cycle.  The i960 was
supposed to have gone the other way.

>Maybe IA-64 flopped for the same reasons as i860: good for HPC, too
>hard to program for everything else; but I still think it had more
>potential.

Seems to me the problem there is that the hardware caught up with the
software.  Trace scheduling was a big win in the 1980s because the
compilers could find all sorts of parallelism to keep multiple units
busy at runtime.  Now the pipelines are so deep and the decoders so
sophieticated that they can get pretty close on the fly, with a lot
simpler ISA and compiler technology.

R's,
John

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i860 on Bitsavers Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2011-09-10 16:20 -0700
  Re: i860 on Bitsavers anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2011-09-11 07:41 +0000
    Re: i860 on Bitsavers John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> - 2011-09-11 15:58 +0000
      Re: i860 on Bitsavers nmm1@cam.ac.uk - 2011-09-11 16:46 +0100
        Re: i860 on Bitsavers John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> - 2011-09-11 23:37 +0000
    Re: i860 on Bitsavers Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2011-09-11 12:15 -0700

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