Uncommon: Intel Paragon on iOffer

[Randy Dawson]

The i860 was in:

Stardent Vistra
AT&T 3d PC accelerator card for TOPAS

both failed in the marketplace, this was the year of the 25MHz Compaq that was almost as fast, at least running TOPAS.  I think the Vistra held on for a bit with Weitek vector processor supporting it.  Stardent (Kubota Computer Graphics) was the largest computer failure and bankruptcy at the time, late 80s.


> From: spectre at floodgap.com
> Subject: Re: Uncommon: Intel Paragon on iOffer
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
> Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:26:52 -0800
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> I know I've seen i860s in graphics boards. I think one of the NeXTs used
> them as well.
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
>   Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
> -- Out of my mind (back in an hour). ------------------------------------------