Intel i960

Intel i960 (or 80960 ) is a RISC -based microprocessor design that as an embedded microcontroller was during the 1990s, quite successfully, for some time, so much so that the AMD Am29000 displaced from the top of this market. Despite this success, the distribution of the i960 in the late 1990s was due to a contract with Digital Equipment Corporation, which allowed Intel to use the design of the StrongARM CPU, set.

Prehistory

The i960 design can be seen as Intel's development of the house, the doomed iAPX -432 designs of the early 1980s. The idea behind the iAPX 432 was direct support of "high-level " functions as tagged and protected memory or garbage collection in hardware. Due to the complexity of the instruction set, its multi- chip implementation and other design weaknesses of the iAPX 432 was very slow compared to other processors of its time.

In 1984, Intel and Siemens launched a joint project called biin to develop a fault-tolerant object-oriented high-end computer system that should be fully programmed in Ada. Many of the members of the I432 team also worked on this project. The targeted market of biin system were users of fault-tolerant computer systems, such as banks, industry and nuclear power plants.

The memory protection system of the I432 influenced the design of the biin system.

Architecture

To avoid the performance issues of I432, the processor in the RISC design was implemented. The memory was 33 bits wide ( 32- bit data word and a " marker bit" for the memory protection). In many respects, the i960 the Berkeley RISC design, for example in the use of register windows, an implementation- specific number of caches for the " per- subroutine" tab for quick routine calls followed. Unlike the i386, but like most other 32 -bit design, the i960 32- bit address space had no memory segmentation. Of the i960 architecture, there was also a superscalar implementation of instructions that are simultaneously distributed to a plurality of units in the processor.

They are usually in network components, RAID systems, terminal computers or imaging equipment used such as printers. They are designed for the rapid acquisition, processing and dissemination of data.