3 ms·
Yes, interest in I2O was lukewarm for the reasons you mention. I gave I2O a brief mention in the article but didn't want to go into too much of a tangent :-) I
by kens 3y ago
Yes, interest in I2O was lukewarm for the reasons you mention. I gave I2O a brief mention in the article but didn't want to go into too much of a tangent :-)
I suspect that some people at Intel really wanted to have IBM System/360 mainframe style I/O channels. There was the 8089 I/O coprocessor for the 8086. The iAPX 432 had a I/O coprocessor (43203) that worked with another microprocessor to act as an I/O channel. And then there was I2O, using an i960 as an I/O processor.
- rjsw 3y agoThe 8089 coprocessor was used in the Apricot PC [1], I had one but don't remember any documentation for the 8089 being available at the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC
- convolvatron 3y agoit had this 'flyby dma' model for doing data transfers without going through the register file. which was pretty handy for making things like channel processors.
- rwmj 3y agoI2O was interesting because for a (short) time it was considered a threat to Linux and open systems. https://lwn.net/1998/1008/a/rms-udi.html https://lwn.net/1998/1008/a/rms-udi.html https://lwn.net/Articles/102772/ https://lwn.net/Articles/102772/ https://lwn.net/Articles/104420/ https://lwn.net/Articles/104420/
- sillywalk 3y agoThis was also the time of the Intel proposed Uniform Driver Interface