Replies to post #45893 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[mas]

hey the article does have more than one page ;-)

Chipguy will be most upset you not fully reading one of his works of art. ;-)

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Eleven years ago Intel startled the world by introducing the first one million transistor microprocessor at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco. That processor's full name was the 80860, a 32-bit RISC processor. Generally known just as the "i860", it was developed as a numeric coprocessor for use in x86-based computers under the code name "N10". But ever opportunistic, Intel decided to market it against competing RISC processors for the technical workstation and server market.

The Intel i860 was, in most respects, a conventional RISC processor. It had thirty two 32-bit general purpose integer registers R0 through R31 (R0 always read as zero), and thirty two 32-bit floating point registers F0 through F31 that could be used in even/odd pairs to store 64-bit floating point values (F0 and F1 always read as zero). The i860 instruction set had a sparse but functional (albeit awkward at times) collection of the normal integer, logical, branch, and memory operations. It occupied a 155 mm2 die manufactured in a 1.0 um two level metal CMOS process. The i860 included 4 Kbytes of instruction cache and 8 Kbytes of data cache, each two way set associative, and a 64-bit wide data bus.
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[CombJelly]

"IAPX32. It sucked, that was the main problem."

Minor nit, iAPX432. You have to admit, it looked good on paper. completely modular, if you need more performance you just plugged in more procssors. Unfortunately, the base performance was only a fraction of an 8086...