[sdiy] Slightly OT : Intel i960

[Magnus Danielson]

From: "John L Marshall" <john.l.marshall at gte.net>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Slightly OT : Intel i960
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 12:54:29 -0800

> i960 is a older (1990 introduction?) RISC processor intended for
> embedded applications.

The i960 even existed in a superscalar version using scoreboarding able
to initiate up to 2 instructions per cycle. As I recall the one I saw
that had it ran at 33 MHz and could thus peak in 66 MIPS. My slowest
computer is running 350 MHz these days... (just to compare)

The i960 is a pretty clean 32 bit RISC processor as I recall it.

> i860 is the same vintage (1990?) but intended for DSP applications. I
> think the i860 would be far more interesting for digital musical
> applications. It could do a floating point add and multiply in a single
> processor cycle.

Ah... the good old i860! 2/3 the power of a Cray 1 Intel claimed.

This IS indeed an interesting piece of machinery, but it is not for the
beginner to say the least. It has three main parts, the RISC processor,
the floating point processor and the graphics processor. It has vectored
processing such that it was suited for graphic processing (and sure, SGI
put many of these babies on the Reality Engine card... was it 8? I don't
recall... it was a big card in a big card-cage... oh, I recall those
days!). It had 64 bit processing and MMU that worked just like the i386
series of processors, which is great since you don't have to have two
competing memory models in the same computer. I think NEC where the only
onces that did a machine that only had a i860 processor, if you go
outside supercomputing aspects (SGI and graphic engines belong there
too).

> Intel Supercomputer Division built a super computer based on the i860. If I
> remember correctly, there could be upto 128 processors arranged in a
> "hyper-cube".

7-dimension cube then.

> Intel should still have information on their site.

Probably. I still have some information on these in my bookshelf, thats
more stable than the Intel website. Intel should really have the money
enought to keep all their past products full documentation online. It's
a real pitty they don't have that. Actually all silicon houses should.

Cheers,
Magnus