10 Facts About Intel i860

Intel i860 is a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989.

The Intel i860 never achieved commercial success and the project was terminated in the mid-1990s.

Intel i860 instructions acted on data sizes from 8-bit through 128-bit.

One unusual feature of the Intel i860 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 Intel i860 was an attempt to avoid this entirely by moving this duty off-chip into the compiler.

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The entire Intel i860 design was based on the compiler efficiently handling this task, which proved almost impossible in practice.

The Intel i860 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 Intel i860, based on RISC technology, which was very fast but compatible with nothing.

Truevision produced an Intel i860-based accelerator board intended for use with their Targa and Vista framebuffer cards.

Good performance was obtained from the Intel i860 by supplying customers with a library of signal processing functions written in assembly language.