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Reads like the Onion, Intel and RISC in the same line. Good news for RISC-V though.
by rataata_jr 5y ago
Reads like the Onion, Intel and RISC in the same line. Good news for RISC-V though.
- johndoe0815 5y agoIntel had some nice RISC processors, the i860 (used in HPC accelerators and the NeXTdimension color graphics card in the early '90s), i960 (used in many laser printers) and the XScale (next generation StrongARM, technology acquired from DEC, back then the fastest ARM CPU). Unfortunately, they killed them all...
- kingsuper20 5y agoI've written software for all three, plus most of the more peculiar TI DSPs and 'graphics' processors. I dearly miss all of the crazy ecosystems.
- pjmlp 5y agoI miss that Intel iAPX 432 failed as a project, it looked like a great design (it was CISC tough)
- linuxlizard 5y agoIntel sold off their X-Scale/StrongARM to Marvell in 2006. https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/ https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/ I was with Marvell at the time and we were pretty excited to get it.
- drcongo 5y agoWhat happened to it since? edit: not snark, genuinely know nothing about these things.
- johndoe0815 5y agoI think the last Marvell SoCs based on XScale were part of the PXA3xx series, which came out in 2006. Since then, the ARMv5TE core of the XScale (the original StrongARM uses the ARMv4 architecture) has been replaced by more recent ARM cores (ARMv7). Details can be found on wikipedia as usual (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale). The StrongARM and XScale were the basis of so many interesting products in the late 1990s and early 2000s, e.g. some Acorn RISC PCs, the Apple Newton 2000, the Philips IS2630 Inferno phone, Psion's series 7/Netbook, the first Compaq iPaq series and other Windows CE-based PDAs (many of which were the first mobile devices Linux was ported to), and the Netwinder network computer (which still has its own web page - http://www.netwinder.org http://www.netwinder.org). The LART by TU Delft was an open source hardware project based on the StrongARM (https://web.archive.org/web/20060207043722/http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060207043722/http://www.lart.t...) and the Itsy was a prototype handheld device developed by DEC WRL to prototype mobile applications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsy_Pocket_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsy_Pocket_Computer). Good times...
- drcongo 5y agoThanks for the detailed reply!
- ch_123 5y agoThe i860 did not live up to expectations - it was a VLIW design and much like the Itanium design which followed, the platform was largely sank by the inability of compilers to generate code that made full use of the chip. https://www.realworldtech.com/intel-history-lesson/3/ https://www.realworldtech.com/intel-history-lesson/3/
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoThere's an imperative for Intel to look less moribund and conveniently RISC-V has the potential to knobble the competition. So this all looks much more promising.
- schmorptron 5y agoYou think they're betting on it to just skip ARM and for it to be the next big thing? One thing I'm confused about: Does SiFive "own" the RISC-V IP and is just publishing it under open licences at the moment, or are they just the biggest and most promising company to work with it ATM?
- brucehoult 5y agoSiFive doesn't own or control the RISC-V instruction set. It owns some CPU core designs it has developed, in the same way that Apple owns the M1 chip but doesn't own the ARM ISA.
- rataata_jr 5y agoARM and Nvidia and the others. I wouldn't get into ARM if I were Intel.