5 ms·

Fun fact, Intel did this exact thing once before, in 1981, with the iAPX 432: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i

Fun fact, Intel did this exact thing once before, in 1981, with the iAPX 432: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power calculators, of all things. iAPX 432 was a clean sheet 32 bit design designed for high level languages and real computers, kind of like mini Lisp machines, complete with native machine support for garbage collection. But it was taking a while to get out the door, and performance wasn't so great, so they hacked together a quick upgrade to the 8080... the 8088, which was used in the original IBM PC. History takes over from there.

krylon 5y ago
And they did it again with the i960 and i860. I'm told they were quite nice processors in their day (never having been close to one myself, that was before my time), but for whatever reasons, they did not go mainstream.
- rwmj 5y ago
  The i860 was lovely! I wrote some software for an i860-based hypercube back in the day, and it was the fastest thing on earth. The reason it never went mainstream is easy enough to explain: expensive chips and (for the hypercube) a very different programming model.
- justthisonce666 5y ago
  I've programmed both, though only shipped products that used the i960 (CA and KB). I believe the i960 tended to be used in things like printers but there weren't many design wins for the i860. I managed to miss the magic that is the 88k thankfully. Who actually used it? Linotype? Tek workstations maybe?
  - justthisonce666 5y ago
    While I was musing about such matters, now, the TI C80 MVP, that was an interesting one to write software for.
  - __d 5y ago
    Some NCD X terminals used M88k CPUs.
    - the_only_law 5y ago
      I’ve been trying to hunt down some X terminals recently. So far have only found some HP ones.
      - __d 5y ago
        I used to have both a 15" all-in-one model, and a separate pizza-box style model with a 17" monitor. IIRC, both were 88k CPUs.
  - jes 5y ago
    I worked with the Intel i960CA parts and the i960MX parts, while working for Applied Microsystems Corporation (now defunct.) Applied made high-end in-circuit emulators. My team worked on software for execution trace disassemblers. We had wide and deep memories and could record something like 16,384 bus cycles in emulator (trace) memory. Once we had some bus cycles to analyze, we’d sort out what the processor had done when it ran (an execution trace) and show it. It was a great tool for answering questions like “How did I get here?” when your embedded code jumped off into the weeds. The i960CA was relatively simple to work with. The i960MX was a lot more complicated, as I recall.
  - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    I think either the i860 or i960 was a CPU used in Adaptec PCI cards in the 90s.
    - krylon 5y ago
      I recall Wikipedia saying one of them (I tend to confuse the two) was popular in RAID controllers, so that sounds plausible.
  - bashinator 5y ago
    I believe Data General AViiON mainframes used m88k CPUs. One came through a used computer shop I worked at in the early 2000s.
- quercusa 5y ago
  The i960 flopped in part because it was tied [0] to the I2O ('Intelligent I/O') project. (The 2 was always rendered as a subscript). I2O pushed a split-driver model in which the OS driver ('top half') did not talk directly to its hardware ('bottom half'), but queued I2O messages to the bottom half, which sat behind the i960 which did the proxy work. IHVs had little interest in I2O as it would reduce Intel's costs for swapping out vendors and there was no demonstrable performance improvement. The latter was at least in part because the I2O infrastructure was immature in comparison to the IHV drivers. It eventually formed the model for I/O over Infiniband (where it did make sense). [0] It's not clear if I2O was the original application for the 960 or it was a pivot for an otherwise homeless processor.
  - drmpeg 5y ago
    I2O was definitely a pivot. The original i960Kx, i960Cx and i960Jx had nothing to do with I2O. I2O was introduced later with the i960Rx series. I developed an i960RP design back in the late '90s for an MPEG-2 encoder PCI card. The encoder chips were also PCI, so the PCI bridge on the i960RP made for a nice design where all the PCI stuff was handled in one fell swoop.
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    During the eighties there was a joint research project of Intel with Siemens, for a new processor architecture named BiiN. For some reason, the BiiN project was terminated in 1988 and Siemens was not interested any more in it. On the other hand Intel decided to not scrap the results of that project and they introduced the 80960 series based on the architecture formerly known as BiiN. The commercial name 80960 was derived from their previous 8096 series of 16-bit microcontrollers, so 80960 was initially presented as higher-performance 32-bit replacement for the 8096 series, which was used in various embedded computers. One interesting feature of BiiN was that it was the first monolithic CPU with an atomic fetch-and-add instruction (first used in 1981 in the NYU Ultracomputer project). The 80960 inherited the atomic fetch-and-add from BiiN and then Intel added it to 80486, under the XADD mnemonic, together with the atomic compare-and-swap taken from IBM 370 and Motorola 68020 (CMPXCHG). The applications for which 80960 was best known, like I2O and laser printers, happened significantly later than its initial introduction.
- f00zz 5y ago
  The i960 was the main CPU in the Sega Model 2 arcade board, used in games like Daytona USA and Virtua Cop. At the time (early 1990s) the texture mapped 3D graphics in those games were pretty impressive. https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_2 https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_2
- cesaref 5y ago
  I remember i860 accelerator cards being used with Fortran compilers, not really sure if this went anywhere, it's all a bit hazy exactly what happened, but the i860 was VLIW, so the compiler tech required for Itanium was already being explored for the i860. I also believe that MMX was basically lifted from the i860, although again, i'm not sure. It's funny, I tend to think of Intel as the boring chip company, due to the success and legacy that we like to moan about from ia-32, but they have actually made a fair few plays to try and move things on from there, fighting against the market which just wanted ia-32 compatible but faster processors.
  - krylon 5y ago
    I don't know about the i860, but accelerator cards for math-heavy workloads are still a thing, of course. I remember seeing a brochure for an add-on card with one or two Cell CPUs, Intel has (had?) their Xeon Phi, and of course GPUs are very popular for things other than graphics. Intel, for better or worse, are a victim of their own success. On the plus side, their success gave them lots of money to throw at the problem of making faster x86 CPUs. It seems, though, that Intel is gradually running out of luck, with AMD and now Apple introducing strong competitors, and Intel's advantage in fabrication eroding. So CPU-/ISA-wise, things could get very interesting in the foreseeable future.
ngcc_hk 5y ago
ibm used 8088 a 8 bit bus version of 8086?
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Comment corrected.
criticas 5y ago
There were two competing schools of thought in the late '70s and early '80s. One said that computer hardware should have hardware support for high level languages. That school led to the VAX, iAPX432, and 80X86. The other school said that computer hardware should be simple so that it could go faster, and that the compiler should be smart enough to map high level languages to simple hardware. Intel was firmly in the first camp. It flirted with the second repeatedly: see the late '80s i860/i960. Itanium was the biggest bet placed: it was a RISC-like architecture with the added complexity of multiple dispatch encoded in it's Very Long Instruction Word architecture. The compiler could rearrange instruction order to keep hardware busy, AND (to some extent) instruction contents. Itanium seemed like a reasonable bet, and Intel (and HP) had the clout to convince others. It was a factor in the decline of the Alpha and MIPS server market, and even Sun hedged its bets by porting Solaris.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> That school led to the VAX, iAPX432, and 80X86. The MC68000 ISA was meant to run C code.
justthisonce666 5y ago
>They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power calculators, I remember talking to Vic Poor when I used to work with him and calculators didn't seem to figure into the whole deal. It's probably worth a quick read through Datapoint history.
- fredoralive 5y ago
  I think the poster is thinking of the 4004, which was originaly designed for a calculator. But that isn't really related to the 8008 onwards, which are based on a Datapoint computer terminal as you say.
masswerk 5y ago
> They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power calculators, of all things. The 8008 was the (slower) single-chip implementation of the Datapoint 2200 terminal's processor. The DP 2200 was a serial terminal capable of running code on its own as a standalone machine, conceived in 1969 (originally as a drop-in replacement for the IBM 129 key punch), announced in 1970, and eventually introduced in 1971. Datapoint had commissioned the chip, but rejected the result, as it was slower than the discrete logic design, with rights for the chip-implementation remaining at Intel. This remarkable terminal has been with us ever since. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200
jhgb 5y ago
I love the function call timing story: > The iAPX 432 failure could best be summed up by a meeting of Intel marketroids and Tandem engineers who wanted to use the chip in their next generation machine, after the slides, the senior engineer asked: “How long does it take to execute a procedure call?” > The presenter looked it up. “Two hundred and fifty microseconds.” > Tom immediately walked out, followed by the majority of the Tandem software department. The presenter was poleaxed. “What did I say?” Found in comments to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc , but I saw it somewhere else, too, I just don't recall where. Doesn't anyone know?
- mst 5y ago
  Interestingly, it appears based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432#The_project's_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432#The_project's_f... the procedure call instruction was a heavyweight thing designed to maximise features and it could branch much more quickly - but their compilers didn't handle that out of the box.

krylon 5y ago

And they did it again with the i960 and i860. I'm told they were quite nice processors in their day (never having been close to one myself, that was before my time), but for whatever reasons, they did not go mainstream.

rwmj 5y ago
The i860 was lovely! I wrote some software for an i860-based hypercube back in the day, and it was the fastest thing on earth. The reason it never went mainstream is easy enough to explain: expensive chips and (for the hypercube) a very different programming model.
justthisonce666 5y ago
I've programmed both, though only shipped products that used the i960 (CA and KB). I believe the i960 tended to be used in things like printers but there weren't many design wins for the i860. I managed to miss the magic that is the 88k thankfully. Who actually used it? Linotype? Tek workstations maybe?
- justthisonce666 5y ago
  While I was musing about such matters, now, the TI C80 MVP, that was an interesting one to write software for.
- __d 5y ago
  Some NCD X terminals used M88k CPUs.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    I’ve been trying to hunt down some X terminals recently. So far have only found some HP ones.
    - __d 5y ago
      I used to have both a 15" all-in-one model, and a separate pizza-box style model with a 17" monitor. IIRC, both were 88k CPUs.
- jes 5y ago
  I worked with the Intel i960CA parts and the i960MX parts, while working for Applied Microsystems Corporation (now defunct.) Applied made high-end in-circuit emulators. My team worked on software for execution trace disassemblers. We had wide and deep memories and could record something like 16,384 bus cycles in emulator (trace) memory. Once we had some bus cycles to analyze, we’d sort out what the processor had done when it ran (an execution trace) and show it. It was a great tool for answering questions like “How did I get here?” when your embedded code jumped off into the weeds. The i960CA was relatively simple to work with. The i960MX was a lot more complicated, as I recall.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  I think either the i860 or i960 was a CPU used in Adaptec PCI cards in the 90s.
  - krylon 5y ago
    I recall Wikipedia saying one of them (I tend to confuse the two) was popular in RAID controllers, so that sounds plausible.
- bashinator 5y ago
  I believe Data General AViiON mainframes used m88k CPUs. One came through a used computer shop I worked at in the early 2000s.
quercusa 5y ago
The i960 flopped in part because it was tied [0] to the I2O ('Intelligent I/O') project. (The 2 was always rendered as a subscript). I2O pushed a split-driver model in which the OS driver ('top half') did not talk directly to its hardware ('bottom half'), but queued I2O messages to the bottom half, which sat behind the i960 which did the proxy work. IHVs had little interest in I2O as it would reduce Intel's costs for swapping out vendors and there was no demonstrable performance improvement. The latter was at least in part because the I2O infrastructure was immature in comparison to the IHV drivers. It eventually formed the model for I/O over Infiniband (where it did make sense). [0] It's not clear if I2O was the original application for the 960 or it was a pivot for an otherwise homeless processor.
- drmpeg 5y ago
  I2O was definitely a pivot. The original i960Kx, i960Cx and i960Jx had nothing to do with I2O. I2O was introduced later with the i960Rx series. I developed an i960RP design back in the late '90s for an MPEG-2 encoder PCI card. The encoder chips were also PCI, so the PCI bridge on the i960RP made for a nice design where all the PCI stuff was handled in one fell swoop.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  During the eighties there was a joint research project of Intel with Siemens, for a new processor architecture named BiiN. For some reason, the BiiN project was terminated in 1988 and Siemens was not interested any more in it. On the other hand Intel decided to not scrap the results of that project and they introduced the 80960 series based on the architecture formerly known as BiiN. The commercial name 80960 was derived from their previous 8096 series of 16-bit microcontrollers, so 80960 was initially presented as higher-performance 32-bit replacement for the 8096 series, which was used in various embedded computers. One interesting feature of BiiN was that it was the first monolithic CPU with an atomic fetch-and-add instruction (first used in 1981 in the NYU Ultracomputer project). The 80960 inherited the atomic fetch-and-add from BiiN and then Intel added it to 80486, under the XADD mnemonic, together with the atomic compare-and-swap taken from IBM 370 and Motorola 68020 (CMPXCHG). The applications for which 80960 was best known, like I2O and laser printers, happened significantly later than its initial introduction.
f00zz 5y ago
The i960 was the main CPU in the Sega Model 2 arcade board, used in games like Daytona USA and Virtua Cop. At the time (early 1990s) the texture mapped 3D graphics in those games were pretty impressive. https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_2 https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_2
cesaref 5y ago
I remember i860 accelerator cards being used with Fortran compilers, not really sure if this went anywhere, it's all a bit hazy exactly what happened, but the i860 was VLIW, so the compiler tech required for Itanium was already being explored for the i860. I also believe that MMX was basically lifted from the i860, although again, i'm not sure. It's funny, I tend to think of Intel as the boring chip company, due to the success and legacy that we like to moan about from ia-32, but they have actually made a fair few plays to try and move things on from there, fighting against the market which just wanted ia-32 compatible but faster processors.
- krylon 5y ago
  I don't know about the i860, but accelerator cards for math-heavy workloads are still a thing, of course. I remember seeing a brochure for an add-on card with one or two Cell CPUs, Intel has (had?) their Xeon Phi, and of course GPUs are very popular for things other than graphics. Intel, for better or worse, are a victim of their own success. On the plus side, their success gave them lots of money to throw at the problem of making faster x86 CPUs. It seems, though, that Intel is gradually running out of luck, with AMD and now Apple introducing strong competitors, and Intel's advantage in fabrication eroding. So CPU-/ISA-wise, things could get very interesting in the foreseeable future.

ngcc_hk 5y ago

ibm used 8088 a 8 bit bus version of 8086?

sbierwagen 5y ago
Comment corrected.

criticas 5y ago

There were two competing schools of thought in the late '70s and early '80s. One said that computer hardware should have hardware support for high level languages. That school led to the VAX, iAPX432, and 80X86. The other school said that computer hardware should be simple so that it could go faster, and that the compiler should be smart enough to map high level languages to simple hardware. Intel was firmly in the first camp. It flirted with the second repeatedly: see the late '80s i860/i960. Itanium was the biggest bet placed: it was a RISC-like architecture with the added complexity of multiple dispatch encoded in it's Very Long Instruction Word architecture. The compiler could rearrange instruction order to keep hardware busy, AND (to some extent) instruction contents. Itanium seemed like a reasonable bet, and Intel (and HP) had the clout to convince others. It was a factor in the decline of the Alpha and MIPS server market, and even Sun hedged its bets by porting Solaris.

phkahler 5y ago
>> That school led to the VAX, iAPX432, and 80X86. The MC68000 ISA was meant to run C code.

justthisonce666 5y ago

>They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power calculators, I remember talking to Vic Poor when I used to work with him and calculators didn't seem to figure into the whole deal. It's probably worth a quick read through Datapoint history.

fredoralive 5y ago
I think the poster is thinking of the 4004, which was originaly designed for a calculator. But that isn't really related to the 8008 onwards, which are based on a Datapoint computer terminal as you say.

masswerk 5y ago

> They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power calculators, of all things. The 8008 was the (slower) single-chip implementation of the Datapoint 2200 terminal's processor. The DP 2200 was a serial terminal capable of running code on its own as a standalone machine, conceived in 1969 (originally as a drop-in replacement for the IBM 129 key punch), announced in 1970, and eventually introduced in 1971. Datapoint had commissioned the chip, but rejected the result, as it was slower than the discrete logic design, with rights for the chip-implementation remaining at Intel. This remarkable terminal has been with us ever since. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200

jhgb 5y ago

I love the function call timing story: > The iAPX 432 failure could best be summed up by a meeting of Intel marketroids and Tandem engineers who wanted to use the chip in their next generation machine, after the slides, the senior engineer asked: “How long does it take to execute a procedure call?” > The presenter looked it up. “Two hundred and fifty microseconds.” > Tom immediately walked out, followed by the majority of the Tandem software department. The presenter was poleaxed. “What did I say?” Found in comments to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc , but I saw it somewhere else, too, I just don't recall where. Doesn't anyone know?

mst 5y ago
Interestingly, it appears based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432#The_project's_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432#The_project's_f... the procedure call instruction was a heavyweight thing designed to maximise features and it could branch much more quickly - but their compilers didn't handle that out of the box.