David Hess (davidwhess.delete@this.gmail.com) on September 28, 2013 11:59 am wrote:
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on September 28, 2013 10:51 am wrote:
> > David Hess (davidwhess.delete@this.gmail.com) on September 28, 2013 10:00 am wrote:
> > >
> > > I do not remember i960 ever being marketed as a general purpose processor
> > > so it was never intended to replace or even compete with x86.
> > >
> > > Competition in the embedded market would have been much stiffer and even x86 did not survive there.
> > > I actually have a few digital storage oscilloscopes which
> > > use either the 8088 or 80188 as embedded processors
> > > and I know Intel produced x86 chips for embedded application up through the i486 and probably the Pentium.
> > > Somewhere I still have the quad flat pack packaged 486 they sent me for evaluation.
> >
> > Depends on what you call "chips for embedded application".
> > If I am not mistaken, embedded i486/Pentiums were more or less the same as
> > PC chips, i.e. low-integration parts that needed several support chips and
> > non-trivial board design effort to make something useful out of them.
> > Not quite the same as 386SX, where all you needed to add was flash+SRAM.
>

I wanted to say 386EX.


> None of the x86 processors intended for the embedded market as Intel saw it had high integration
> as I think of it. The closest one with integrated functions I encountered was the 186 but
> some of the embedded 386 variants have integrated functions and the 376 lacked support for
> real mode and paging.

386EX is a real microcontroller. It did not have as many peripherals as the most integrated contemporaries - no on-chip SRAM, no DRAM controller, no ADCs, no DACs, no sophisticated capture modes on digital inputs, no SPI, etc... But at least it had multiple chip-select units with programmable wait states, timers, UARTs, DMAs, interrupt controllers, may be, few other things that I forgot.
On CPU side it had full-featured 386 with 16-bit external bus, similar to 386SX.
It was pretty easy to design around, so, apart from couple of designs that required x86 compatibility, we put it into at least on design that didn't care about ISA.

> I see now they had/have a Pentium M with even more integration:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolapai

Yes, Tolapai looked cool. But it got zero marketing from Intel representatives.
More recently Intel and Altera also released dual-die package with Atom+Arria. This one was less interesting, IMHO, but I admit to have prejudice against Arria series.

>
> Like you say, the 486GX which Intel sent me for evaluation would have required considerable
> outside support but that was available at the time from a number of vendors.
>
> All of the designs I encountered had I/O and memory expansion implemented via SSI and maybe MSI
> logic so any effort to use them was already non-trivial. I still use SSI logic for I/O expansion
> on true microcontrollers because of level shifting, routing, and noise constraints.
>

We do very few designs without FPGA, so SSI chips are not part of our arsenal.
I only programmed board with SSI once, it was pre-built ARM (Xscale) SBC.