I think the bond wire pattern was just for layout convenience: if the buses end up on one side, why run wiring around to the other side? As far as the NSA, I h

I think the bond wire pattern was just for layout convenience: if the buses end up on one side, why run wiring around to the other side? As far as the NSA, I haven't come across any mention of the NSA using the chip, but I guess that doesn't say much :-) The chip was popular with the military and it seems like to would be good for NSA-style applications (processing large quantities of data). The i960 has bit instructions that would be useful for the NSA such as scan for the most-significant set bit in a word, although I don't think it has population-count which the NSA likes.