3 ms·
I forgot how powerful the i960 was - and how this demonstrated that despite that - that compatibility was king.
by outside1234 3y ago
I forgot how powerful the i960 was - and how this demonstrated that despite that - that compatibility was king.
- kjs3 3y agoSee also: Itanium. Volume customers care about software, not hardware.
- nine_k 3y agoThe i960 apparently had enough embedded use, e.g. in printers, switches, terminals. That is, where binary compatibility did not matter much. We under-appreciate how little binary compatibility matters now, so that you can even develop something on an ARM-based machine and then rebuild and safely deploy to an x64-based machine (usually because it's Node, JVM, Python, etc).
- shrubble 3y agoThe problem with the i960 was that (according to the last comment on https://www.righto.com/2023/07/the-complex-history-of-intel-i960-risc.html https://www.righto.com/2023/07/the-complex-history-of-intel-... ) the 386 team got more resources and a better process node than the i960, which was produced on a 1.0-micron process, which was already old at that time.