it wasn't a total failure. the 860 and 960 were decent little engines that found a home in high performance computing and embedded applications that needed a little oomph. I worked on some 860 array products and certainly remember finding 960s in printers and other gear

Trivia: The i960 was used to power Sega's highly successful Model 2 arcade board, which truly ushered in the era of 3D gaming* (with Daytona USA), and was used in the F-22 Raptor until it was later replaced with other CPUs.

* Certainly not the first 3D arcade hardware but arguably this along with Namco's MIPS-based System 22 (Ridge Racer, released a little before Daytona), was the inflection point that made 2D effectively obsolete.

Worked on an i860 Stratus machine in the early 90s - provided a key part of our distributed infra due to its FT capabilities.

Its really said the i960 didn't take off. Intel wasn't in Unix workstation market much and the high end was owned by Digital and IBM. Intel was working on i860, i960,

Intel if they had added quicker, could have cooperated with a Unix workstation maker and potentially done really well.

Sun was defiantly looking around for a chip partner at the time, but non of the American companies were interested so they went Japan. So the timing didn't really work out. A Sun Intel alliance would have been a scary prospect and beneficial for both companies.