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From: brooks@vette.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Evans and Sutherland quits the superbusiness
Message-ID: <38966@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 19 Nov 89 20:29:26 GMT
References: <27611@dhw68k.cts.com>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
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Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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In article <27611@dhw68k.cts.com> stein@dhw68k.cts.com (Rick 'Transputer' Stein) writes:
>The New York Times reported today that E&S is bowing out of the
>superconfuser business.
E&S did not see the Killer Micros coming.  Any vendor who
invested time and money in a "custom" CPU implementation
over the past several years is getting eaten alive by the sudden
onslaught of the Killer Micros.  You can't sell an expensive
slow computer in a competitive market.

Its going to be a terrible year for vendors of custom architectures,
new vendors will be completely flushed and old vendors will barely
survive on the hysterisis of their existing customer base.

Even the CEO of Cray Research mentioned the RISC microprocessors
in the recent Supercomputing '89 conference in his keynote address.
He referred to the performance increases of microprocessors as
"astounding."
brooks@maddog.llnl.gov, brooks@maddog.uucp