And they did it again with the i960 and i860. I'm told they were quite nice processors in their day (never having been close to one myself, that was before my time), but for whatever reasons, they did not go mainstream.
IHVs had little interest in I2O as it would reduce Intel's costs for swapping out vendors and there was no demonstrable performance improvement. The latter was at least in part because the I2O infrastructure was immature in comparison to the IHV drivers. It eventually formed the model for I/O over Infiniband (where it did make sense).
[0] It's not clear if I2O was the original application for the 960 or it was a pivot for an otherwise homeless processor.
I developed an i960RP design back in the late '90s for an MPEG-2 encoder PCI card. The encoder chips were also PCI, so the PCI bridge on the i960RP made for a nice design where all the PCI stuff was handled in one fell swoop.
For some reason, the BiiN project was terminated in 1988 and Siemens was not interested any more in it.
On the other hand Intel decided to not scrap the results of that project and they introduced the 80960 series based on the architecture formerly known as BiiN.
The commercial name 80960 was derived from their previous 8096 series of 16-bit microcontrollers, so 80960 was initially presented as higher-performance 32-bit replacement for the 8096 series, which was used in various embedded computers.
One interesting feature of BiiN was that it was the first monolithic CPU with an atomic fetch-and-add instruction (first used in 1981 in the NYU Ultracomputer project).
The 80960 inherited the atomic fetch-and-add from BiiN and then Intel added it to 80486, under the XADD mnemonic, together with the atomic compare-and-swap taken from IBM 370 and Motorola 68020 (CMPXCHG).
The applications for which 80960 was best known, like I2O and laser printers, happened significantly later than its initial introduction.
You mean it was biinned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960
The I2O project wasn't until the mid 1990's
In 1984 it was just the start of a research project named BiiN, of Intel and Siemens, which lasted 4 years, until 1988, when Siemens dropped out.
The series name, 80960, did not appear before the launch from 1988.
The reason it never went mainstream is easy enough to explain: expensive chips and (for the hypercube) a very different programming model.
I also believe that MMX was basically lifted from the i860, although again, i'm not sure.
It's funny, I tend to think of Intel as the boring chip company, due to the success and legacy that we like to moan about from ia-32, but they have actually made a fair few plays to try and move things on from there, fighting against the market which just wanted ia-32 compatible but faster processors.
Intel, for better or worse, are a victim of their own success. On the plus side, their success gave them lots of money to throw at the problem of making faster x86 CPUs. It seems, though, that Intel is gradually running out of luck, with AMD and now Apple introducing strong competitors, and Intel's advantage in fabrication eroding. So CPU-/ISA-wise, things could get very interesting in the foreseeable future.
I managed to miss the magic that is the 88k thankfully. Who actually used it? Linotype? Tek workstations maybe?
Applied made high-end in-circuit emulators. My team worked on software for execution trace disassemblers. We had wide and deep memories and could record something like 16,384 bus cycles in emulator (trace) memory.
Once we had some bus cycles to analyze, we’d sort out what the processor had done when it ran (an execution trace) and show it. It was a great tool for answering questions like “How did I get here?” when your embedded code jumped off into the weeds.
The i960CA was relatively simple to work with. The i960MX was a lot more complicated, as I recall.