Intel Corp is reported to have spun out development of 80860 board and system level products to a company in which it has also taken a stake – Aquest Inc. Kanwar Chada, former product marketing manager for the 80860 RISC processor, has gone over to Aquest to take charge of this change in direction, together with Les Kohn, also from Intel. Aquest is likely to concentrate on developing a new range of high performance graphics workstations, a task for which the chip was originally intended. Intel will retain overall development of the processor. And it now seems that the much talked about enhanced version of the 80860 – the 80870 or i870 – is likely to appear in the first quarter of next year, with more support for multi-processing, including bus snooping and cache coherency.
