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.
The i960 flopped in part because it was tied [0] to the I2O ('Intelligent I/O') project. (The 2 was always rendered as a subscript). I2O pushed a split-driver model in which the OS driver ('top half') did not talk directly to its hardware ('bottom half'), but queued I2O messages to the bottom half, which sat behind the i960 which did the proxy work.
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.
During the eighties there was a joint research project of Intel with Siemens, for a new processor architecture named BiiN.
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.
I2O was definitely a pivot. The original i960Kx, i960Cx and i960Jx had nothing to do with I2O. I2O was introduced later with the i960Rx series.
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.
The i960 was the main CPU in the Sega Model 2 arcade board, used in games like Daytona USA and Virtua Cop. At the time (early 1990s) the texture mapped 3D graphics in those games were pretty impressive.
I remember i860 accelerator cards being used with Fortran compilers, not really sure if this went anywhere, it's all a bit hazy exactly what happened, but the i860 was VLIW, so the compiler tech required for Itanium was already being explored for the i860.
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.
I don't know about the i860, but accelerator cards for math-heavy workloads are still a thing, of course. I remember seeing a brochure for an add-on card with one or two Cell CPUs, Intel has (had?) their Xeon Phi, and of course GPUs are very popular for things other than graphics.
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've programmed both, though only shipped products that used the i960 (CA and KB). I believe the i960 tended to be used in things like printers but there weren't many design wins for the i860.
I managed to miss the magic that is the 88k thankfully. Who actually used it? Linotype? Tek workstations maybe?
I worked with the Intel i960CA parts and the i960MX parts, while working for Applied Microsystems Corporation (now defunct.)
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.
