Wanted: iAPX-432

[emanuel stiebler]

Jim Battle wrote:
> 
> >Yes. Was slow too ;-)
> 
> Hey, now.  I've actually used an i860.  

I still use them. Sitting in myu DecStattion Pmax & doing graphics ;-)

> For its time, it was the best deal around for doing floating
> point.  Getting the maximum rated performance out of it required a lot of
> very careful hand scheduling of instructions, but that's true of most
> processors. 

The problem at the beginning with this CPU was, that intel liked to
announce 
it as a "cray on the desktop". And I never saw a bigger discrepancy 
between a data sheet and the actual performance.

> I also believe it was the first microprocessor that had more
> than 1M transistors, though a lot of that was contained in the two
> caches. 

Looking at the die photos, looks like a SRAM ;-)

> It could dispatch two floating point ops per cycle, and that was
> back in 1991.

And intel "invented" MMX & SIMD ten years later again ;-)
 
> The 860 had a few problems. ...

And, the execution times of many instructions (arithm) were dependend on
the operands.

But, to say something nice, it was easy to design with. 8-bit boot eprom
64-easy data bits, same MMU as the 80386, ...

Hauppage made a nice board, havin a 486 & a 860 with shared memory.

cheers