I860 MICROPROCESSOR INTERNAL ARCHITECTURE

How many different types of commercial jet aircraft have been built since 1950? In fact, there have been only a handful of commercial jets, although there have been many variants. The same is true of microprocessors. There have been many variations on relatively few themes. Recent developments in semiconductor technology, the influence of RISC architectures, and the migration of mainframe characteristics to silicon have led to the appearance of some radically new designs. The Intel i860 is one such processor. This article describes the important features of the 64-bit i860: its pipelined organization, floating-point unit, its inherent parallelism, memory management unit, on-chip cache and graphics unit. These features, together with its 80 MFLOPS peak single-precision performance, make the i860 a formidable new computing engine. © 1990.