With Oki Electric Industry Co folding its 80860 tents and Alliant Computer Systems Corp in an urgent quest for new funds, Intel Corp has been less than enthusiastic about the future of its 80860 – getting the 80586 into battle readiness in such a short space of time has taken up much of the company’s research and development resources in any case. But part of Intel’s de-emphasis is due to the fact that it believed the 80860 would gather its own momentum as Microsoft Corp brought its New Technology operating system over to the chip. Microsoft had 80860s in its labs, but its engineers, while said to be not unimpressed with the part, didn’t want to spend the next six years writing assembler code, for the very complex processor, and shelved the implementation. The M15 follow-on to the current 80860 XP hasn’t been cancelled, but Intel isn’t being very specific about what is going to happen to it.
