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From: hh2@prism.gatech.EDU (HAAS)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Where's the i860? (was Re: 486SX - Intel now telling lies)
Message-ID: <30379@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Date: 2 Jun 91 15:21:02 GMT
References: <1991May29.230433.10095@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> <1991May30.164751.16585@thyme.jpl.nasa.gov> <1991May31.183111.16505@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1991Jun2.030215.11584@unixland.natick.ma.us> <1991Jun2.041512.29546@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: Georgia Tech Research Institute
Lines: 50

In article <1991Jun2.041512.29546@leland.Stanford.EDU> fangchin@leland.Stanford.EDU (Chin Fang) writes:
>In article <1991Jun2.030215.11584@unixland.natick.ma.us>, bill@unixland.natick.ma.us (Bill Heiser) writes:
>|> In article <1991May31.183111.16505@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> tmkk@uiuc.edu (K. Khan) writes:
>|> >
>|> >It means that Intel is scared silly of the industry's upcoming move to
>|> >the MIPS RISC chips, and is going to milk us for every single cent it
>|> >can while it is still able to do so.
>|> 
>|> How does the i486 compare with the 20 - 30 MIPS of the SUN Sparc chips?
>|> How about the MIPS chips?
>|> 
>
>Hi Bill :-) and everyone,
>
>I try to stay objective.  Let's use i486 33Mhz as baseline for the CISC side,
>and IBM POWER archecture as the RISC side baseline.
>
>Assuming that everything runs in memory, then i486 33 Mhz offers you about 21
>MIPS and less then 2 MegaFLOPS.   Now IBM RISC POWERstation 320 20Mhz offers
>you 29.5 MIPS and 8.5 MFLOPS.  So given enough memory to both, i486 33Mhz 

( body of nicely written survey deleted )

>Remember even Intel had to venture into RISC and made this i860?  And lot's
>people use it as graphic coprocessor or numerical coprocessor, why? RISC,
>=> superior floating point performance (> 30 MegaFLOPS), that is.

80 MFLOPS (FP multiply/accumulate in one clock cycle) SO . . . . .
Where are the i860 based machines ?!? YEARS ago (it seems) when IBM
announced their Wizard adapter (an MCA bus-mastering i860 board)
they claimed "AIX support in the next version" Well, the next version has
come and gone, and now we can "access" the board from AIX. We can
also compile C, C++, Fortran and Pascal code on the Microway i860
card (got one of those: not bad). Where are the machines? Why doesn't
anyone port thier PC-based Unix to one of the i860 cards?

The only i860 base machine I've heard of is a retro-fit for the SPARC
machines. My guess is that the people that CAN make an i860 based machine
simply don't want to. Why would IBM port AIX PS/2 to an add-on card??
Would they ever sell an RS/6000 then? Locus probably doesn't because
IBM won't let them. What about SCO or interactive?

80 MFLOPS.

Anybody got any ideas as to why we haven't seem more from this chip,
or rumors of upcoming products?

>Chin Fang

hh