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Comment by johndoe0815 | Hacker News Reader

Intel had some nice RISC processors, the i860 (used in HPC accelerators and the NeXTdimension color graphics card in the early '90s), i960 (used in many laser printers) and the XScale (next generation StrongARM, technology acquired from DEC, back then the fastest ARM CPU).

Unfortunately, they killed them all...

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Intel sold off their X-Scale/StrongARM to Marvell in 2006. https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/ I was with Marvell at the time and we were pretty excited to get it.

What happened to it since?

edit: not snark, genuinely know nothing about these things.

I think the last Marvell SoCs based on XScale were part of the PXA3xx series, which came out in 2006. Since then, the ARMv5TE core of the XScale (the original StrongARM uses the ARMv4 architecture) has been replaced by more recent ARM cores (ARMv7). Details can be found on wikipedia as usual (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale).

The StrongARM and XScale were the basis of so many interesting products in the late 1990s and early 2000s, e.g. some Acorn RISC PCs, the Apple Newton 2000, the Philips IS2630 Inferno phone, Psion's series 7/Netbook, the first Compaq iPaq series and other Windows CE-based PDAs (many of which were the first mobile devices Linux was ported to), and the Netwinder network computer (which still has its own web page - http://www.netwinder.org).

The LART by TU Delft was an open source hardware project based on the StrongARM (https://web.archive.org/web/20060207043722/http://www.lart.t...) and the Itsy was a prototype handheld device developed by DEC WRL to prototype mobile applications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsy_Pocket_Computer).

Good times...

Thanks for the detailed reply!

I miss that Intel iAPX 432 failed as a project, it looked like a great design (it was CISC tough)

The i960 was the iAPX 432 redone as a RISC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960

Later versions had the object-oriented / security features stripped out.

Forgot about the linage, thanks for brigging it up.

The i860 did not live up to expectations - it was a VLIW design and much like the Itanium design which followed, the platform was largely sank by the inability of compilers to generate code that made full use of the chip.

https://www.realworldtech.com/intel-history-lesson/3/

I've written software for all three, plus most of the more peculiar TI DSPs and 'graphics' processors.

I dearly miss all of the crazy ecosystems.

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