10 Facts About Intel 860

The iIntel 860 never achieved commercial success and the project was terminated in the mid-1990s.

IIntel 860 combined a number of features that were unique at the time, most notably its very long instruction word architecture and powerful support for high-speed floating-point operations.

One unusual feature of the iIntel 860 was that the pipelines into the functional units were program-accessible, requiring the compilers to order instructions carefully in the object code to keep the pipelines filled.

The iIntel 860 was an attempt to avoid this entirely by moving this duty off-chip into the compiler.

The entire iIntel 860 design was based on the compiler efficiently handling this task, which proved almost impossible in practice.

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The iIntel 860 had several pipelines and an interrupt could spill them and require them all to be re-loaded.

We now had two very powerful chips that we were introducing at just about the same time: the 486, largely based on CISC technology and compatible with all the PC software, and the iIntel 860, based on RISC technology, which was very fast but compatible with nothing.

IIntel 860 did see some use in the workstation world as a graphics accelerator.

Truevision produced an iIntel 860-based accelerator board intended for use with their Targa and Vista framebuffer cards.

Good performance was obtained from the iIntel 860 by supplying customers with a library of signal processing functions written in assembly language.