On Fri, 23 Sep 2022, emanuel stiebler via cctalk wrote: I can't help with your quest, however I wish you both luck and the energy to preserve your old grey cells when dealing with these beasts. Back in the day I did some work on the i860. Fascinating chip. Very capable of doing high speed vector math and multiply + add in a single cycle. As long as you were prepared to sacrifice the old grey cells to it's dual-instruction mode programming. I didn't do anything in C that I recall, all assembler (I was involved mostly in test/diagnostics and low-level accesses - we had them on a shared memory system with Transputers being relegated (by then) to nothing more than "smart" comms chips... (Late 80s) I think we used the Portland Group C and FORTRAN compilers, but even then we had large librarys hand-coded in assembler to achieve that fabled 3 instructions per cycle quote - you have to effectively pump the floating point pipeline by hand so you ran operations that assembled to a 64-bit word which was one 32-bit instructions for the integer unit (say a load from RAM into FPU pipeline) and one for the FPU (say, a multiply and add instruction). So some 8 cycles later you'd actually start to get results out as it took 8 cycles to actually do the multiply and add - however it was one cycle after that - good for vector work, but sub-optimal for a single number multiply. And lets hope you never, ever, have to take an interrupt during an FP operation. It's 100's of cycles to save/restore the pipeline. I think there was a unix/unix-like OS for them, but I imagine context switching was slow... Cheers, Gordon

parallel. It ran some kind of Unix and there has to have been a gcc port. https://www.vaxbarn.com/42-repair/756-ipsc-860-repair -Jon +44 7792 149029

Hi Emanuel, On 9/23/22 16:30, emanuel stiebler via cctalk wrote: I've got a PC with an Hauppauge 4860 motherboard. There's a 80486 and a 80860 CPU on the board. I have some things online for this machine on ftp://ftp.groessler.org/pub/chris/i860. I've put it online there long ago. I think the "i860tools-linux.tar.bz2" file could contain a gcc version for i860. But I found no source code for the compiler/toolchain when looking at the contents of this file. I had a gcc version in source code (work-in-progress), created by Jason Eckhardt, at some point in time (in the later 200X time frame). I could try to dig it out. I've also got a DOS version of (I think) the Portland Group C compiler for the i860. regards, chris

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? -Ali

On Sat, 24 Sept 2022 at 05:50, Ali via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: Yes, me too. This has come as a bit of a surprise to me in fact. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven(a)gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

Thanks that explains most of what I have seen. I have also seen it used on a number of SCSI controllers of yore and I believe the HP LJ 4 also used the i960 for its processor. Outside of the Hauppauge 4860 I don't think I have ever seen a PC architecture board with the i860 and I am not even sure how much use the Hauppauge board got out of the i860 except for video processing. -Ali

fre 2022-09-23 klockan 10:30 -0400 skrev emanuel stiebler via cctalk: pick together something like a sunos 5 or sunos4 machine and build the tool-chain on that ? i believe it is enough building binutils (which has gas) and gcc late 90s version. The trouble is mainly finding a compiled compiler for sunos5. Sun's compiler in sunos4 is part of the OS, not unbundled. NetBSD or FreeBSD is another possibility.

I don't know how old a GCC you can build on current machines. The other way around, yes. But it's hard to see why old on new would be a problem. You can grab any GCC version you want and try it yourself. As for when i860 disappeared, no idea. The release notes would say, so you could search those. Or the ChangeLogs. A quick scan says that i860 support was removed in 2002, put back in 2003. The newest reference is in 2005. So if you grab a 2004 release of GCC it's likely to have the support. Similarly, FWIW, I see references to i960 in the 2003 ChangeLog. paul

According to gcc-9.1.0/NEWS Intel i860 was an architecture declared obsolete in GCC 4.0 (and previously in GCC 3.1). So you could check the configuration files are there in 3.4.6 (2006-03-10) or in 4.0.4 (2007-01-31). The binutils/gas/i860 configuration files were removed in 2018-04-11, so binutils 2.30 (2018-01-28) may still be able to build cross binutils assemblers and linkers for the architecture. I don't have an unpacked gdb lying around to check. The announce mailing list archives https://sourceware.org/pipermail/gdb-announce/ may be worth checking if the config isn't in gdb.

On 9/28/2022 20:18, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: Which switches/options did you use? Last weekend I spent some cycles to try ... I can build the binutils around 2.32, emitting elf No luck at all, getting gcc to compile. Support for the i860 was removed very early after 4.0, going back to 3.x versions fails as they can't compile on 64 bit systems. (and also never used ELF, but COFF?) So stuck a little at the moment, I guess I have to install some linux 32 bit version, and try again ...