> I always thought the i960 was an upgrade to the i860 (sort of like i386 to > i486 upgrade). However, based on the info on wiki it seems as if the i960 > actually came first and although a RISC chip it was in no way in the same > league as the i860. Anyone can clarify or verify this? I'm not even sure I'd call them related. The i960 is a very different, almost "normal" RISC chip compared to the i860, though it uses Berkeley register windows like SPARC. It has excellent XOR performance, so it got used a lot later on in RAID arrays (my Apple Network Server 500 has a RAID card with an i960 on it). A few systems used it and it was popular in military applications but it never achieved its potential mostly due to internal politics at Intel -- not because it sucked -- and the DEC StrongARM settlement mostly put a stake through it.
-- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- The faster we go, the rounder we get. -- The Grateful Dead, on relativity --
