recompile" between generations. This mostly works for embedded devices, including smartphones, but did not work for personal computers, workstations, and servers, except maybe for IBM and Apple
it works perfectly for every workstation and server made from POWER4 to POWER9 because DARPA allocates money for it, so IBM engineers thought about it not once but 5-6 times(2) before finalizing the design of their POWER machines, including a plan to produce the 970 as a light version of their POWER4: great move, it saves a lot of money, which is reinvested in research and development!
Like predicted by Tanenbaum, it also works perfectly for everything that you can always recompile from GNU or BSD sources instead of commercial binary-only software that you can only try to disassemble and hack.
OpenSource Workstations and servers, like POWER9 ones running nothing but GNU/Linux, PPC64/LE, or PPC64/BE!
- - -
Looking back, and considering that "Miins" is not a physical person but a group of engineers from Intel sustaining the project, by judging their preliminary and i960 designs, they have my respect, so
I think I can basically redirect my disdain towards the Intel ruling class, those assholes who first abandoned the i960 MMU, condemning it to certain death as ARM was coming and everyone was bullying the UNIX world, a world you either had an MMU for... or it was very hard to run a kernel and applications profitably(1), then they took away more and more resources from development and research budget - "
we sell x86 for compatibility, not i960" - intel! and eventually dropped almost everything except what paid for the military, as the 960 went on almost solely for the military.
if Steve Job had chosen the i960 chip for his Next line of computers, we probably would have seen those assholes in the ruling class of Intel devote much more engineering resources and at least Intel would have churned out i960 chips with TLB, so not only could NewOS (BeOS) or Mach ( the future MacOS), but even Unix and Linux!
When Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple Computer executive, founded BeOS, he thought PowerPC 603/4 (G2) was a good platform to develop BeOS, imagine if he also had the i960 at his disposal. Most likely his BeBOX PPC-G2 would not have wasted millions on research and development before realizing that there was no future with PowerPC because it was too niche.
Later development releases of BeOS/PPC were ported to run on the Macintosh, and Macintosh clone makers, including Power Computing and Motorola, signed deals to ship BeOS with their hardware when the OS was finalized.
In light of this, Be stopped production on the BeBox after selling only around 2000 units, and focused entirely on the development of BeOS/x86.
I bought, and developed on/for two of those BeBox/PPC 2000 units
If Intel had churned out the i960, the whole market would have gone after it, and today we would have peripherals that work not only on those cursed PCs but everywhere! On any platform!
If there's one thing intel engineers are good at is making chips, they're the best in the world at it, so imagine what firepower we would have with a sane alternative made by intel itself!
A fancy policy like this:
do you want Unix? buy our i960 with MMU!
do you want dos/windows? buy our i386, i486, ...
do you want military devices? buy our i960 MILSTD
do you want embedded devices? over time we produce Atom technology based not on i486, but on i960!
(atom was a business failure because too slow compared to ARM alternatives)
They could have even avoided the epic fail of Itanium since i960 could very well have offered 64bit evolutions
And it would have brought much more benefits, as had been discussed by the same intel engineers. It is a pity that the ruling class did not want to listen to them.
The more I delve into the alternatives, the more I think they had that money and several opportunities to successfully and mutually benefit change the x86 legacy.
Now they are researching quantum computing, and they already have a product ...
We will see ...
(1) the xterms HP 700/RX, Entria, Envizex, are hw X-Terminals based on i960, no MMU, so they run a VxWorks kernel + custom embedded X11 + mwm and/or twm and misc ad-how applications all as statically compiled tasks in a flat linearly addressed space, which perfectly works for the X11-term purpose but it is not ok for a general purpose OS.
(2) with more money they relax the "ready to market" deadline. They can allocate more time to develop a product.