Personally I always thought the i860 was far from a
stumble, because in
fact it was the highest MFlops/dollar and MFlops/watt for a considerable
length of time and used in a number of high-horsepower applications
in the real world.
And Intel sure sold quite a few i860s. I would bet that most i860s
ended up as coprocessor cards in PeeCees, where they did one task and
did not run into the dreaded pipeline flush context switch problem.
--
Will