i860 questions!

[Jeff Carroll]

In article <1990Feb7.182841.21103 at hcr.uucp> miken at hcr.uucp (Mike Nemeth) writes:
>is there a i860 board out there yet, that is one that mere mortals can buy,
>as opposed to cartels and consortiums? if so, how much? C compilers?
>how about i860 boards that plug into AT bus based machines? EISA machines?
>hints, pointers, directions, ... appreciated. thanx in advance...

This morning I spoke with John Hughes, VP of Sales for Sky Computers Inc.,
about the SKYbolt, a VME board with an i860 CPU and an i960 interface
processor. It is initially targeted for the Sun workstation environment,
but will be adapted to other VME environments as suits customer demand. 

Hughes claimed 10 DP MFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark (I presume the
100x100) and 82.9k Dhrystones/sec.

The initial product is a 9U board with up to 4 MB of SRAM. Price for a
board with the full complement of memory is just over $20K. There are
plans for a follow-on product using page-mode DRAM with a 256K SRAM cache.
(Sky claims bandwidth of 160 MB/sec. to memory.)

The i960 processor performs DMA transfers to/from the SKYbolt memory over
the VME bus, as well as supporting a VSB interface and a proprietary
auxiliary I/O port.

Sky is offering Metaware High C and Lahey Fortran on the SKYbolt. They
have integrated Metaware's code generator with a Sky-proprietary
vectorizer and special optimizers for the i860 which take advantage of the
i860's dual instruction mode. The C is apparently ready; the FORTRAN is
about to enter beta release, with final product expected in March.

Math libraries offered with the SKYbolt include Pacific Sierra and QTC
Math Advantage, along with a library that will emulate the Sky Warrior 3
array processor.

Sky Computer is at 27 Industrial Avenue, Chelmsford, MA 01824. Phone for
John Hughes, VP of Sales, is 508 250 1920.
:--------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is not an endorsement of this product by either myself or the Boeing
Company. I am not responsible for the accuracy of this information, though
this is my understanding of what was told me by the vendor. Call him, not
me.

	Jeff Carroll
	carroll at atc.boeing.com