Intel i960

Intel's i960 (or 80960) was a RISC-based microprocessor design that became popular during the early 1990s as an embedded microcontroller. It became a best-selling CPU in that segment, along with the competing AMD 29000. In spite of its success, Intel stopped marketing the i960 in the late 1990s, as a result of a settlement with DEC whereby Intel received the rights to produce the StrongARM CPU. The processor continues to be used for a few military applications. The i960 design was begun in 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 design flaws, the iAPX 432 was very slow in comparison to other processors of its time. 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, although a new lead architect, Glenford Myers, was brought in from IBM. The intended market for the BiiN systems was high-reliability-computer users such as banks, industrial systems, and nuclear power plants. Intel's major contribution to the BiiN system was a new processor design, influenced by the protected-memory concepts from the i432. The new design was to include a number of features to improve performance and avoid problems that had led to the i432's downfall. The first 960 processors entered the final stages of design, known as taping-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 extracting several subsets of the full capability architecture created for the BiiN system.