Intel's i960 (or 80960) was a RISC-based microprocessor design that became popular during the early 1990s as an embedded microcontroller, becoming a best-selling CPU in that field, along with the competing AMD 29000. In spite of its success, Intel dropped i960 marketing in the late 1990s as a side effect of a settlement with DEC in which Intel received the rights to produce the StrongARM CPU. The processor continues to be used in a few military applications. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ... Microprocessors, including an Intel 80486DX2 and an Intel 80386. ... See also 1990s, the band The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive, sometimes informally including popular culture from the very late 1980s and from 2000 and beyond. ... A router, an example of an embedded system. ... A microcontroller (or MCU) is a computer-on-a-chip used to control electronic devices. ... AMD 29000 Microprocessor The AMD 29000, often simply 29k, was a popular family of RISC-based 32-bit microprocessors and microcontrollers from Advanced Micro Devices. ... Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... DEC StrongARM SA-110 Microprocessor The StrongARM microprocessor is a faster version of the Advanced RISC Machines ARM design. ...

Origin

Intel i960 microprocessor/microcontroller.

The i960 design was started as a response to the failure of Intel's iAPX 432 design of the early 1980s. The iAPX 432 was intended to directly support high-level languages that supported tagged, protected, garbage-collected memory — such as Ada and Lisp — in hardware. Because of its instruction-set complexity, its multi-chip implementation, and other design flaws, the iAPX 432 was very slow in comparison to other processors of its time. Download high resolution version (678x678, 23 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Download high resolution version (678x678, 23 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... The Intel iAPX 432 was Intels first 32-bit microprocessor design, introduced in 1981 as a set of three integrated circuits. ... Ada is a structured, statically typed imperative computer programming language designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull during 1977–1983. ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ...

In 1984 Intel and Siemens started a joint project, ultimately called BiiN, to create a high-end fault-tolerant object-oriented computer system programmed entirely in Ada. Many of the original i432 team members joined this project, though a new lead architect was brought in from IBM, Glenford Myers. The intended market for the BiiN systems were high-reliability computer users such as banks, industrial systems and nuclear power plants, and the protected-memory concepts from the i432 influenced the design of the BiiN system. Siemens AG (FWB:SIE, NYSE: SI) is the worlds largest electronics company. ... BiiN was a company created out of a joint research project by Intel and Siemens to develop fault tolerant high-performance multi-processor computers build on custom microprocessor designs. ... Ada is a structured, statically typed imperative computer programming language designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull during 1977–1983. ...

Architecture

To avoid the performance issues that plagued the i432, the central i960 instruction-set architecture was a RISC design, only implemented in full in the i960MX, and the memory subsystem was made 33-bits wide — for a 32-bit word and a "tag" bit to indicate protected memory. In many other ways the i960 followed the original Berkeley RISC design, notably in its use of register windows, an implementation-specific number of caches for the per-subroutine registers, allowing for fast routine calls. The competing Stanford University design, commercialized as MIPS, did not use this system, relying on the compiler to generate optimal subroutine call and return code instead. Unlike the i386, but in common with most 32-bit designs, the i960 has a flat 32-bit memory space, with no memory segmentation. The i960 architecture also anticipated a superscalar implementation, with instructions being simultaneously dispatched to more than one unit within the processor. Berkeley RISC was one of two seminal research projects into RISC-based microprocessor design taking place under ARPAs VLSI project. ... In computer engineering, the use of register windows is a technique to improve the performance of a particularly common operation, the procedure call. ... Stanford redirects here. ... A MIPS R4400 microprocessor made by Toshiba MIPS, for Microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages, is a RISC microprocessor architecture developed by MIPS Computer Systems Inc. ... The Intel 80386 is a microprocessor which was used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many personal computers from 1986 until 1994 and later. ... Segmented memory is a methodology employed by computer programmers. ... A superscalar CPU architecture implements a form of parallelism on a single chip, thereby allowing the system as a whole to run much faster than it would otherwise be able to at a given clock speed. ...

i960 variants

The first 960 processors "taped-out" in October 1985 and were sent to manufacturing that month, with the first working chips arriving in late 1985 and early 1986. The BiiN effort eventually failed, due to market forces, and the 960MX was left without a use. Myers attempted to save the design by outlining several subsets of the full capability architecture created for the BiiN system. Myers tried to convince Intel management to market the i960 (then still known as the "P7") as a general-purpose processor, both in place of the Intel 80286 and i386 (which "taped-out" the same month as the first 960), as well as the emerging RISC market for Unix systems, including a pitch to Steve Jobs's for use in the NeXT system. Competition within and outside of Intel came not only from the i386 camp, but also from the i860 processor, yet another RISC processor design emerging within Intel at the time. An Intel 80286 Microprocessor AMD 80286 with 12 Mhz. ... The Intel 80386 is a microprocessor which was used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many personal computers from 1986 until 1994 and later. ... Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer and was the CEO of Pixar until its acquisition by Disney. ... Look up Next in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The Intel 80386 is a microprocessor which was used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many personal computers from 1986 until 1994 and later. ... The Intel i860 (also 80860, and code named N10) was a RISC microprocessor from Intel, first released in 1989. ...

Myers was unsuccessful at convincing Intel management to support the i960 as a general-purpose or Unix processor, but the chip found a ready market in early high-performance 32-bit embedded systems. The protected-memory architecture was considered proprietary to BiiN and wasn't mentioned in the product literature, leading many to wonder why the i960MC was so large and had so many pins labeled "no connect". A version of the RISC core without memory management or an FPU became the i960KA, and the RISC core with the FPU became the i960KB. The versions were, however, all identical internally — only the labelling was different. A floating point unit (FPU) is a part of a CPU specially designed to carry out operations on floating point numbers. ...

The "full" i960MX was never released for the non-military market, but the i960MC was used in high-end embedded applications and i960KA became successful as a low-cost 32-bit processor for the laser-printer market, as well as for early graphics terminals and other embedded applications. Its success paid for future generations, which removed the complex memory sub-system.

The i960CA, first announced in July 1989, was the first pure RISC implementation of the i960 architecture. It featured a newly-designed superscalar RISC core and added an unusual addressable on-chip cache, but lacked an FPU and MMU, as it was intended for high-performance embedded applications. The i960CA is widely considered to have been the first single-chip superscalar RISC implementation. The C-series only included one ALU, but could dispatch and execute an arithmetic instruction, a memory reference, and a branch instruction at the same time, and sustain two instructions per cycle under certain circumstances. The first versions released ran at 33Mhz, and Intel promoted the chip as capable of 66 MIPS. The i960CA microarchitecture was designed in 1987–1988 and formally announced on September 12, 1989. Later, the i960CF included a floating-point unit, but continued to omit an MMU. A superscalar CPU architecture implements a form of parallelism on a single chip, thereby allowing the system as a whole to run much faster than it would otherwise be able to at a given clock speed. ...

Demise

Intel attempted to bolster the i960 in the I/O device controller market with the I2O standard, but this had little success and the design work was eventually ended. By the mid-90's its price/performance ratio had fallen behind competing chips of more recent design, and Intel never produced a reduced power-consumption version that could be used in battery-powered systems. Intelligent Input/Output (I2O) is a hardware specification that describes a model for offloading I/O processing from the CPU. This has the potential to result in extremely high performance I/O, but it is not a replacement for the PCI architecture. ... In economics and engineering, the price/performance ratio refers to a products ability to deliver performance, of any sort, for its price. ...

In 1990 the i960 team was redirected to be the "second team" working in parallel on future i386 implementations — specifically the P6 processor, which later became the Pentium Pro. The i960 project was sent to another, smaller development team, essentially ensuring its ultimate demise. However the Indian "HAL Tejas" light combat aircraft's MMR (Multi-mode radar) is said to use i960. The adaptation of "HAL Tejas" into the Indian air force might only be around 2010. The Intel 80386 is a microprocessor which was used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many personal computers from 1986 until 1994 and later. ... Pentium Pro 256 KB Pentium Pro 512 KB Pentium Pro 1 MB Pentium Pro underside (256/512) Pentium II Overdrive The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 architecture microprocessor (P6 core) by Intel originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications, but later reduced... The HAL Tejas (Sanskrit: Radiance) is a compact supersonic multirole interceptor fighter aircraft being developed by India. ... The HAL Tejas (Sanskrit: Radiance) is a compact supersonic multirole interceptor fighter aircraft being developed by India. ...

External links

• i960 homepage at Intel
• i960 images and descriptions at cpu-collection.de

List of Intel microcontrollers

MCS-48 (8048 family) | MCS-51 (8051 family) | 8061 | MCS-96 (8096 family) | (80186) | (80188) | 80376 | 80386EX | i960 (80960) (italics indicate non-x86-architecture controllers) Image File history File links Intel-logo. ... A microcontroller (or MCU) is a computer-on-a-chip used to control electronic devices. ... The Intel 8048 microcontroller (µC), Intels first µC, was used in the Magnavox Odyssey² video game console and (in its 8042 variant) in the original IBM PC keyboard. ... Pin diagram of 40 pin Intel 8051 Microcontroller The Intel 8051 was a Harvard architecture single chip microcontroller (µC) developed by Intel in 1980 for use in embedded systems. ... The Intel 8061 microcontroller is most notable for its use in the Ford EEC-IV automotive engine control unit. ... An Intel 80186 Microprocessor The 80186 architecture. ... The Intel 80188 is a version of the Intel 80186 microprocessor with an 8 bit external data bus, instead of 16 bit. ... The Intel 80376, introduced January 16, 1989, was a variant of the Intel 80386 intended for embedded systems. ... The Intel 80386EX (386EX) is a variant of the Intel 386 microprocessor designed for embedded systems. ... x86 or 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture first developed and manufactured by Intel. ...