The i860TM 64-bit supercomputing microprocessor

The Intel i860TM processor is a RISC-based microprocessor incorporating a RISC core with memory management, a floating point unit, and caches on a single chip. The 1,000,000 transistors allow a single chip implementation with highly optimized interunit communication and wide internal data buses. The parallelism and pipelining between the execution units, and the innovative cache management techniques are under explicit control of software. Vectorizable applications can use the pipelined adder and multiplier units to achieve up to 80 Mflops at 40 Mhz for the inner loops of common calculations. Special instructions allow using the data cache as a flexible vector register and support high data bandwidth from main memory. Finally, to support visualization of data, special hardware for 3D graphics is included.