i860: Re: modern stuff

[Paul Koning]

> 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