11 Facts About Intel 960

In spite of its success, Intel stopped marketing the i960 in the late 1990s, as a result of a settlement with DEC whereby Intel received the rights to produce the StrongARM CPU.

Intel 960's major contribution to the BiiN system was a new processor design, influenced by the protected-memory concepts from the i432.

The first Intel 960 processors entered the final stages of design, known as taping-out, in October 1985 and were sent to manufacturing that month, with the first working chips arriving in late 1985 and early 1986.

Intel 960 tried to convince Intel management to market the i960 as a general-purpose processor, both in place of the Intel 80286 and i386, as well as the emerging RISC market for Unix systems, including a pitch to Steve Jobs for use in the NeXT system.

Competition within and outside of Intel 960 came not only from the i386 camp but from the i860 processor, yet another RISC processor design emerging within Intel 960 at the time.

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In many ways, the iIntel 960 followed the original Berkeley RISC design, notably in its use of register windows, an implementation-specific number of caches for the per-subroutine registers that allowed for fast subroutine calls.

The iIntel 960 architecture anticipated a superscalar implementation, with instructions being simultaneously dispatched to more than one unit within the processor.

In 1990, the iIntel 960 team was redirected to be the "second team" working in parallel on future i386 implementations—specifically the P6 processor, which later became the Pentium Pro.

The iIntel 960 project was given to another smaller development team, essentially ensuring the end of its developmental life.

IIntel 960 was used in some Brocade Fibre Channel switches to run Fabric OS.

IIntel 960 processor is used in Automatic Radar Plotting Aid interfacing boards in radars from Kelvin Hughes.