Editing Intel i860 (section)

==Applications==
[[Image:Paragon Card.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Three i860 XP-50 CPUs on a circuit board from Intel's [[Intel Paragon|Paragon XP/S supercomputer]]]]

At first, the i860 was only used in a small number of [[supercomputer]]s such as the [[Intel iPSC/860]]. Intel later marketed the i860 as a workstation microprocessor for a time, where it competed with microprocessors based on the [[MIPS architecture|MIPS]] and [[SPARC]] architectures, among others. The [[Oki Electric]] OKI Station 7300/30<ref>{{cite web
 |title=Oki Electric OKI Station 7300/30-Computer Museum
 |url=http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/work/0029.html
 }}</ref> and [[Stardent]] Vistra 800<ref>{{cite web
 |title=Intel i860 - From Here to There
 |url=http://blog.garritys.org/2010/04/intel-i860.html
 |year=2010
}}</ref> [[Unix]] workstations were based on a 40&nbsp;MHz i860 XR running [[UNIX System V]]/i860.<ref>{{cite web
 |title=KUBOTA Computer/Stardent AVSstation Titan Vistra 800
 |url=http://computer-zoo.org/vistra/
 |access-date=2014-05-14
 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140514150713/http://computer-zoo.org/vistra/
 |archive-date=2014-05-14
 |url-status=dead
 }}</ref>  The [[Hauppauge Computer Works|Hauppauge]] 4860<ref>{{cite web
 |title=GeekDot - Hauppauge 4860
 |date=20 March 2008
|url=http://www.geekdot.com/hauppauge-4860.html
}}</ref> and [[Olivetti]] CP486<ref>{{cite web
 |title=GeekDot - Olivetti CP486
 |date=16 August 2011
|url=http://www.geekdot.com/olivetti-cp486.html
}}</ref> featured an [[Intel 80486]] and i860 on the same motherboard.  Microsoft initially developed what was to become [[Windows NT]] on internally designed i860XR-based workstations (codenamed ''Dazzle''), only porting NT to the [[MIPS architecture|MIPS]] ([[Jazz (computer)|Microsoft Jazz]]), [[Intel 80386]] and other processors later. Some claim the NT designation was a reference to the "N-Ten" codename of the i860XR.<ref name="thurrott-roadtogold">{{cite web
 |url          = http://winsupersite.com/article/windows-server/windows-server-2003-the-road-to-gold-part-one-the-early-years-127432
 |title        = Windows Server 2003: The Road To Gold
 |date         = 2003-01-24
 |first        = Paul
 |last         = Thurrott
 |work         = Win super site
 |access-date   = 2013-09-02
 |archive-url  = https://web.archive.org/web/20110720042038/http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows-server/windows-server-2003-the-road-to-gold-part-one-the-early-years-127432
 |archive-date = 2011-07-20
 |url-status   = dead
}}</ref>

The i860 also saw some use in the [[workstation]] world as a graphics accelerator. It was used, for instance, in the [[NeXTdimension]], where it ran a cut-down version of the [[Mach kernel]] running a complete [[PostScript]] stack. However, the [[PostScript]] part of the project was never finished so it ended up just moving color pixels around. In this role, the i860 design worked considerably better, as the core program could be loaded into the cache and made entirely "predictable", allowing the compilers to get the ordering right. The NeXTdimension could produce 32-bit graphics faster than the main NeXTcube's [[Motorola 68030]] could produce 2-bit graphics.

[[Truevision]] produced an i860-based accelerator board intended for use with their Targa and Vista framebuffer cards. [[Pixar]] produced a custom version of [[Pixar RenderMan (software)|RenderMan]] to run on the card that ran approximately four times faster than the 386 host. Another example was [[Silicon Graphics|SGI]]'s [[RealityEngine]], which used a number of i860XP processors in its geometry engine. This sort of use slowly disappeared as well, as more general-purpose CPUs started to match the i860's performance, and as Intel turned its focus to [[Pentium]] processors for general-purpose computing.

[[Mercury Computer Systems]] used the i860 in their [[multicomputer]]. From 2 to 360 compute nodes would reside in a [[circuit switched]] [[fat tree]] network, with each node having local memory that could be mapped by any other node. Each node in this heterogeneous system could be an i860, a [[PowerPC]], or a group of three [[Super Harvard Architecture Single-Chip Computer|SHARC]] DSPs. Good performance was obtained from the i860 by supplying customers with a library of signal processing functions written in assembly language. The hardware packed up to 360 compute nodes in [[rack unit|9U]] of [[19-inch rack|rack]] space, making it suitable for mobile applications such as airborne radar processing.

During the early 1990s, [[Stratus Technologies]] built i860-based servers, the XA/R series, running their proprietary [[Stratus VOS|VOS]] operating system.<ref>{{cite web
 |title=Stratus Machine History
 |url=http://ftp.stratus.com:80/vos/doc/reference/machine_history.txt
 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030612194052/http://ftp.stratus.com:80/vos/doc/reference/machine_history.txt
 |url-status=dead
 |archive-date=2003-06-12
 }}</ref>

Also in the 1990s, [[Alliant Computer Systems]] built their i860-based FX/800 and FX/2800 servers, replacing the FX/80 and FX/8 series that had
been based on the Motorola 68000 ISA. Both the Alliant and Mercury compute systems were in heavy use at NASA/JPL for the [[Spaceborne Imaging Radar|SIR-C]] missions.

The U.S. military used the i860 for numerous aerospace and [[digital signal processing]] applications as a coprocessor, where it saw use up until the late 1990s.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/print/volume-8/issue-5/features/technology-focus/cots-board-vendors-make-their-dsp-choices.html|title = StackPath| date=May 1997 }}</ref>