Tim, re: it looks to me to have been the same "high performance microcontroller" niche/space as the Intel 960 was in.
Absolutely. I spent a good part of my career at Intel fighting the "printer wars" in the i960 group. The 29K was a formidable competitor. In those days, the architecture that was used by HP was, by default, the "big dog" in the printer market. And the printer market was the "big segment" for high-end embedded microprocessors. I worked in a group of program managers and engineers focused solely on winning HP designs and handling the care and feeding of the designs once they were won. We even created custom variations of the i960 architecture (jointly developed by Intel & HP) to secure some of these designs. (Aside: my time working in this group was probably the most rewarding in my career at Intel).
After years of battle between the 29K and i960, AMD abruptly dropped the market. The market was tough, with printer manufacturers such as HP, Lexmark, NEC, etc. demanding ever higher performance at the price of last year's solution. Intel cranked up the design machine, churning out the i960Jx series then the superscalar i960Hx series. I don't think AMD had the wherewithal to fight a major design war on both the x86 and 29K fronts and chose to concentrate on the x86 battle. The margins in the embedded market have always paled in comparison to margins in the reprogrammable market. It was probably the right decision for AMD, IMHO.
Enjoy your posts, glad to see you on the Intel board.
Kind regards,
greg |
