I2O was definitely a pivot. The original i960Kx, i960Cx and i960Jx had nothing to do with I2O. I2O was introduced later with the i960Rx series.

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.