Talk:Intel i960

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I was on the i960 design team, wrote a compiler for it, ported UNIX to it, and later led one of the marketing teams. Many of the edits to this page have been from people who have only read about the i960 (and the i432). If you are going to expand the page, fine. But there is a lot of misinformation about the relationship of the i960 to the i432 floating around, and I don't want to see it promulgated here. gnetwerker - 1/1/05

[edit] Still in use today

This article leaves me with an impression that the i960 is not really in use to today. AFAIK, the i960 is in use in many high end Adaptec SCSI controllers.

[edit] Rumors

When I was doing i960 support for Intel in the late 90s, there was a rumor floating around about Windows 3.1 being ported to the i960CX and it vastly outperforming the i386. The project was supposedly canned because "we're in the business of selling x86, not 960". Can anyone confirm this rumor? Billbrasky 19:50, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

This is not true. It maybe a result of the fact that the i860 did have a version of Windows ported to it, though I think it was WindowsNT. I ported UNIX to the original i960, but Intel decided not to sell the memory-managed version of the chip (MC) to the commercial market (saying something like the quote you relate), so this went nowhere, and the later i960CA lacked an MMU altogether. So the rumor reflects an underlying truth, but is not in detail correct. -- Gnetwerker 21:28, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

P.s. -- BTW, my somewhat fuzzy recollection was that it was Dave House who, failing to be convinced by Glen Myers, put the kibosh on the i960 as a UNIX machine, fearing competition and distraction. (As much as I hated the decision at the time, in retrospect it was probably correct.) In any case, I got the impression from Glen that Andy Grove ratified the decision. House led the 386 marketing team at the time, that being 1986. Had Steve Jobs chosen the chip for the Next machine, things probably would have worked out differently. -- Gnetwerker 21:33, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

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