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To: dale_laroy who wrote (136338)	5/30/2001 5:09:01 PM
From: Saturn V	Respond to of 186894

Ref < I was unaware of the i960 being targeted at any market other than the microcontroller market.> Intially the 960 was not developed as a microcontroller. It was a general purpose processor targeted for high reliability computing a la Tandem. Intel and Siemens funded a company called BIN which would market systems based on this architecture. This elegant processor was to absorb the best features of the failed 432. The 960 development happened almost in parallel with the 80386. It may also have served as an insurance policy for the 80386. The x86 family had to be compatible with the old generations going all the way back to 8008. The concern has always been that this backward compatibility could degrade the performance too much. However the 80386 was a smashing success; and the BIN system operation collapsed and folded. So this elegant architecture had no market, and it got tweaked and re-outfitted as a microcontroller. Both the 960 and the 80860 chips may have served as backups to the x86 family in the eventuality that the penalty of the backward x86 compatibility got too much. It may also have taught Intel the RISC design tricks, which were subsequently absorbed into the Pentium and Pentium II design cores.