Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Dan3]

They pushed the i860 for a lot longer than most people remember.

This document discusses the three leading i860 compilers, offered by
• Portland Group, ver 2.1 38% improvement
• MicroWay NDP, ver 4.1d 32% improvement
• MetaWare, ver 2.4 35% improvement
http://www.dalsoft.esmartweb.com/i860.htm

Here's another comment:
We have been selling compilers for the i860 for 3 years now, both C and
Fortran. Relevant numbers:
Matrix multiply: 27 Mflops
Linpack (DP) 100x100: 9.4 Mflops
Linpack (DP) 300x300: 11.5 Mflops


http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/92-10-003

For several years, the i860 was generally expected to replace the X86 family in Intel systems aimed at high end applications.

Here's another reference to the glory days of Intel's last attempt to get away from the X86 architecture:
Tasks for accelerator can be compiled with the use of various compilers and libraries. We checked proper operation of tasks compiled with:

Portland Group (Intel corp.) C compiler v2.1
Portland Group (Intel corp.) FORTRAN compiler v2.1
MetaWare High C(TM) Compiler Release 2.1f
Green Hills FORTRAN-I860(TM) Compiler Release 1.8.5 (1.2a)
Pacific-Sierra Research VAST(R)-2 Vectorizer V2.25.3
GNU i860 C compiler
Special graphics library was developed.

Technical specifications.
Processor:

40 MHz RISC Intel i80860XR;
80 Mflops with matrix operations;
67 Mflops with FFT;
11.8 double precision 100x100 Linpack Mflops;
300 000 short vector per second (24 bit per pixel).
http://www.mics.msu.su/cvteng.html

Microway was biggest seller of i860 systems - its Quadputer with 4 i860s was quite good at the same sorts of vector processing that Itanium's good at. In some ways, Itanium is like 3 i860s in one core.