i860 live?

[Jim Wilson]

In article < 20010416125329.P339@stanford.edu > you write:
>Is i860 a live target?  I see the processor came out in 1989, but can
>find no history of it.  It certainly doesn't seem to be maintained.

The i860 was never a very popular processor.  It had an "interesting"
architecture from a compiler viewpoint.  It had a dual-instruction open
pipeline mode that allowed high performance, but was very hard to generate
code for.  It was used for a few high performance systems because of this,
but never used in any high volume system.  I have an i860 architecture manual,
but have never seen an i860 system.

There are still a few of these machines around.  See for instance
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2000-07/msg00941.html

Jim