Intel Corp is not far away from announcing enhancements to its still new 80860 RISC processor, revealed for the first time at Uniforum in March, industry sources say. Although the 80860 is still only sampling in its 33MHz and 40MHz implementations, the new N11 or 80870 is widely believed to be waiting in the wings, giving a performance boost comparable to that from the 80386 to the 80486 according to one source. The main differences between the N10 and N11 will be more support for multiprocessing, including bus snooping and cache coherency those companies that have used the 80860 in multi-processors, such as Real World Graphics Ltd have had to build those features around the chip. The N11 will also be more closely aligned with the 80486, being nearly pin-compatible and able to work in a more closely-coupled fashion as an 80486 co-processor. Computer Reseller News suggests that Compaq Computer Corp is readying a new machine based on the chip running in conjunction with the 80486 and using an EISA bus – something could be announced as soon as October, although most sources don’t expect to see the chip surface until at least early next year. Others said to be interested include Hewlett-Packard, AST Research, Zenith Data Systems, and Pixar Inc. Further gossip, about a 64-bit version of the 80486 could not be further substantiated by press-time.
