For some reason, the BiiN project was terminated in 1988 and Siemens was not interested any more in it.
On the other hand Intel decided to not scrap the results of that project and they introduced the 80960 series based on the architecture formerly known as BiiN.
The commercial name 80960 was derived from their previous 8096 series of 16-bit microcontrollers, so 80960 was initially presented as higher-performance 32-bit replacement for the 8096 series, which was used in various embedded computers.
One interesting feature of BiiN was that it was the first monolithic CPU with an atomic fetch-and-add instruction (first used in 1981 in the NYU Ultracomputer project).
The 80960 inherited the atomic fetch-and-add from BiiN and then Intel added it to 80486, under the XADD mnemonic, together with the atomic compare-and-swap taken from IBM 370 and Motorola 68020 (CMPXCHG).
The applications for which 80960 was best known, like I2O and laser printers, happened significantly later than its initial introduction.
You mean it was biinned.
I developed an i960RP design back in the late '90s for an MPEG-2 encoder PCI card. The encoder chips were also PCI, so the PCI bridge on the i960RP made for a nice design where all the PCI stuff was handled in one fell swoop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960
The I2O project wasn't until the mid 1990's
In 1984 it was just the start of a research project named BiiN, of Intel and Siemens, which lasted 4 years, until 1988, when Siemens dropped out.
The series name, 80960, did not appear before the launch from 1988.
IHVs had little interest in I2O as it would reduce Intel's costs for swapping out vendors and there was no demonstrable performance improvement. The latter was at least in part because the I2O infrastructure was immature in comparison to the IHV drivers. It eventually formed the model for I/O over Infiniband (where it did make sense).
[0] It's not clear if I2O was the original application for the 960 or it was a pivot for an otherwise homeless processor.