29 Oct
2018
29 Oct
'18
2:20 p.m.
On Oct 29, 2018, at 5:12 PM, Eric Smith via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
The i960 was how Intel repositioned it to try to salvage as much as
possible. Most i960 variants either don't have the tag bit hardware and
object-oriented "microcode" that was used for BiiN; it is only officially
present in the i960MX, but might also be in the i960MC. I think only the MX
and MC have an MMU.
I used an i960 at Chipcom. At this point, the only thing I remember is a very awful I/O
architecture. It felt a bit like the seriously broken architecture of the 82586 Ethernet
chip. (Yes, it's possible to design a queue based I/O architecture that is correct;
Dijkstra did so in the Electrologica X8. But Intel was clearly clueless about making
distributed algorithms work.)
paul