[sanguy]

i860 did well in embedded applications and for awhile was the mainstay in most RAID controllers and network communication processors. Not what Intel wanted from it but it did have a long life in such applications. I spent many years working on the i860 and i960 and learned to live with its oddities.

As for the Cell it was overly complex architecture and had remarkable performance under very optimized code. The hope was hand tuned libraries would address this; and compiler optimizations would take care of the rest. Neither happened in a meaningful way. We did two major projects with the Cell using it for real-time HDTV compression/direct broadcast applications.

Another one not on the list was the inmos Transputer. Again similar to the Cell; very complex and fast for its time; but not easy to achieve this performance. That was my first job as an EE - we used it on a GPS receiver ISA card in the early days of GPS. It was a good choice as very fast and could keep up with the signal processing that allowed us to roll code updates to add major features as various changes to GPS signals were rolled out (P-code on L2, SA being turned off, and later CA code on L2 being unencrypted). Our competitors had to redesign ASICS to get these new features which means long product cycles and hardware replacement.

Today I find myself doing a lot on the M1 series, as well as Epyc. Now you can give zero shits about clean optimized code and it still runs amazingly fast. Last time I had to do assembler or intrinsics was many many years ago - and I sort of miss that intimacy with the hardware to get the most out of it.

[pinewurst]

I think you mean 960 in RAID and comm controllers. The 860 had incredibly bad, almost unbelievably slow context switches. You’d never ever use it in a controller. A dedicated render pipeline is pretty all it was good for, for some value of ‘good’.

[notacoward]

I had the same reaction. The i860 and i960 were very different beasts. I owned an 860-based Oki/Stardent workstation, bought for peanuts at the latter company's fire sale, for a while. Later I found the 960CA (in particular) in many storage/network devices. So I kind of know both, but I would never speak of them as if they were the same. Other than sharing a corporate logo, they had little to do with one another.