The i860 introduced many new ideas, some that worked well and were copied and others that turned out to be unfortunate. Using wide datapaths in a single instruc

The i860 introduced many new ideas, some that worked well and were copied and others that turned out to be unfortunate. Using wide datapaths in a single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) scheme for graphics got copied by Sparc and then the x86 and others, for example. A selling point was the floating point performance of a Cray 1, far above what other microprocessors could do. Pipelining was a key to this and, taking the RISC philosophy seriously, it was exposed to the software. The compiler had to schedule the instructions so that they didn't try to use a result from a previous instruction until the clock it finally came out of the pipeline. The problem of an interrupt is that the pipeline is full of unfinished calculations. If you know you are going to return to the same task, you just freeze the pipeline, don't using floating point inside the interrupt and then restart everything when you return you restart everything. If you are going to switch to a different task instead (Unix) then this is a really bad design. The kernel will have to manually flush the floating point pipeline to somewhere, then manually restore the pipeline for the new task and then return to it. The sequence to flush and restore the pipeline is really tricky and slow. Is it intended? In a way, yes. High performance was the highest priority for this project. If you are switching your processor among a bunch of tasks then you really don't care about performance that much, do you? Running Unix on a supercomputer should be possible, but it doesn't have to be good. As long as when you focus on a single program it goes amazingly fast.