Intel i960 evaluation board

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Fri Apr 21 13:50:27 2000

Stan wrote:
> No, but I have an i960 based Unix machine I wouldn't mind trading away.
> (It works, but I can't logon ... don't know the root password, and
> haven't had time to crack it)

i960, or i860? I wasn't aware that any i960 Unix boxes had been shipped.

The i960 family was the stripped-down commercial version of the ill-fated
Gemini (P7) 33-bit (not a typo!) processor, a collaboration between Intel
and Siemens. The two companies created a workstation company called BiiN
to sell the workstations, and although they shipped some prerelease
machines, AFAIK they never offered any for sale.

Intel dropped the 33rd bit and some of the fancy object-oriented features
to produce the i960. Only a few of the i960 variants contain an MMU, and
most of them don't even have floating point. Intel ended up pushing them
as embedded controllers.
Received on Fri Apr 21 2000 - 13:50:27 BST