i860: Re: modern stuff

The i860 did find some use in the radio astronomy world. Here's an excerpt from the 1998 annual report for the Arecibo Observatory... -------------- Telescope pointing and realtime data acquisition are controlled using a network of VMEbus single-board computers running the VxWorks operating system kernel. Custom-built data acquisition devices (??backends??) include (1) a general purpose A/D system capable of sampling four analog channels at up to 10-MHz rates with programmable resolutions of 1 to 12 bits per sample per channel, (2) an ~interim! 50-MHz, 4096-lag Spectral Line Correlator with programmable bandwidth from 195 kHz to 50 MHz, (3) a 50-MHz Radar Decoder, ~4! a 100-MHz Spectral Line Correlator being developed, (5) a 10-MHz bandwidth Pulsar Search/Timing Machine with up to 256 channels, and (6) a wideband continuum/polarimetry instrument being developed. An S2 VLBI system is also available. Additional realtime signal processing capability is provided by four Skybolt i860-based VMEbus single-board computers with 240 MFLOPS peak combined capacity. -------------- Remember when 240 MFLOPS was a lot?