Re: i860, was : Re: modern stuff
On 10/30/18 4:22 AM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote: > So, I'm curious - what's the 'most important missing thing' at the > CHM full-time processing staff
Re: i860, was : Re: modern stuff
> From: Al Kossow > CHM has a rather large Intel Paragon system. > I just recently snagged the software and manuals for it on eBay > which we didn't have Excellent! Congratulations! So, I'm curious - what's the 'most important missing thing' at the CHM - either am important machine that you don't have at all, or part of something (like the above) that you really need to complete something? Noel
Re: i860, was : Re: modern stuff
On 10/27/18 15:04, emanuel stiebler via cctalk wrote: There was actually a nice PC Mainboard from Hauppauge, with an i486 & i860 on the same board ... Always wanted to have one of those, never found a used one. And it was running some king of Unix back then ... http://www.geekdot.com/hauppauge-4860/ I have a computer with this mainboard. I received a DOS version of the Portland Group's C compiler for i860 along with it. The DOS software also had a "run860" program, to -- you guess it -- run programs on the i860. I then wrote a Linux version of "run860" and created an assembler toolchain for Linux to target i860 (using GNU binutils). I was able to compile and run the "blink" demo from the manual on Linux instead of DOS. And some other assembler programs written by me. These things can be found on ftp://ftp.groessler.org/pub/chris/i860 . At this time I was in contact with the original author of the i860 binutils support, Jason Eckhardt. With his help and patch to gcc, I was able to compile newlib with gcc for i860. But I've never tested it beyond compilation. Jason also told me that he had a modified Linux kernel for i860 (which IIRC was for a then already old version of Linux). Since according to the motherboard manual, interrupts from hardware devices always interrupt the i486, and not the i860, I never asked him for this version. Getting that to work, with i486 and i860 cooperation, didn't appeal to me. regards, chris
Re: i860, was : Re: modern stuff
CHM has a rather large Intel Paragon system. I just recently snagged the software and manuals for it on eBay which we didn't have http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1644.99 and others http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=intel+paragon
i860, was : Re: modern stuff
On 2018-10-26 09:10, Gordon Henderson via cctalk wrote: > I worked for a company that made supercomputer boards out of the i860 at > one point - at the time (very early 90's) they were blindingly fast, > 40Mhz, 3 instructions per clock cycle which, since one was a floating > point multiply and add meant that it was pretty good - at the time. > > However it was a royal PITA to code for although a 32-bit CPU, it would > read memory 64 bits at a time (actually 128 IIRC to satisfy the cache), > with half that 64-bit word being an instruction for the integer unit and > half for the floating point unit, so you effectively had to build a > floating point pipeline by hand coded instructions, so 8 (I think) > instructions to load the pipeline, then each subsequent instruction > would feed another value into the pipe, then another 8 at the end to > empty it. Great for big matrix operations, rubbish for a single add of 2 > FP numbers. > > The issue came when you wanted to take an interrupt - the overhead of > flushing the pipe, reloading it all for the next context, and so on > really bogged it down. > > Not to mention writing assembly code in 2 columns... > > There were quite a few systems built with about 30 boards in them, each > having 2 x i860's and a good few MB of RAM (64MB I think) built. There was actually a nice PC Mainboard from Hauppauge, with an i486 & i860 on the same board ... Always wanted to have one of those, never found a used one. And it was running some king of Unix back then ... http://www.geekdot.com/hauppauge-4860/ Cheers
