The i960CA was the one of the first superscalar microprocessors. (I wrote a third-party commercial instruction scheduler for it, that operated on assembly code.) It was pretty nice, certainly in line with the other 32-bit RISCy ISAs of the time. My impression is that its relative lack of success was due to Intel internal politics.
Yes within Intel it was thought that management would not push the 960 since if did so it would be picked up by the press as validated RISC is better. But for embedded applications it was very successful, I was shipping hundreds of thousands of them per month at one point
