That I can believe. Somehow the i860 fits well with Windows in my mind. Though nominally RISCy, it made the mistake later repeated by Itanium: high theoretical

That I can believe. Somehow the i860 fits well with Windows in my mind. Though nominally RISCy, it made the mistake later repeated by Itanium: high theoretical performance impossible to achieve in real programs (not to mention interrupt latency long enough for a vacation on Alpha Centauri). The i960, on the other hand, had IMHO a great instruction set (even after losing the capabilities¹), with clean orthogonal 3-address instructions combined with programmer-friendly addressing modes. ¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_addressing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_addressing