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From: rtp1@quads.uchicago.edu (raymond thomas pierrehumbert)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Anything wrong with the i860
Message-ID: <1991May7.145407.18417@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 7 May 91 14:54:07 GMT
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (NewsMistress)
Organization: University of Chicago
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I have seen relatively little about the i860 chip on this newsgroup.
Also, compared to MIPS, it doesn't seem to be very popular as the
base processor for computers;  Alliant uses it in their shared-memory
machines (800 & 2800), Intel has the Touchstone experimental mpp machine,
and the i860 seems popular as a graphics coprocessor (e.g. in the NeXt),
but generally, I see surprisingly little interest in the chip.

Is there something wrong with the architecture?  As a platform,
what are its advantages and disadvantages over the competition?
I am particularly interested in this, as I am thinking of buying
an Alliant F/800; I did a lot of benchmarks, and the performance
seems extremely good compared to other RISC architectures (even
on a per-processor basis running on throughput rather than
parallelization), so I'm wondering if there isn't some "catch"
I haven't encountered yet.
.