Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!hellgate.utah.edu!cs.utah.edu!thomson
From: thomson@cs.utah.edu (Rich Thomson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Evans and Sutherland quits the superbusiness
Message-ID: <1989Nov19.155445.27287@hellgate.utah.edu>
Date: 19 Nov 89 22:54:45 GMT
References: <27611@dhw68k.cts.com> <38966@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Oasis Technologies
Lines: 37

In article <38966@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> Eugene Brooks writes:
]In article <27611@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.

Wether or not E&S saw the "killer micros" has nothing to do with why they
shut down their supercomputer project.  Hardware problems coupled with the
expense of such a project (especially for a company the size of E&S) were
the major driving factor.

If you take the time to look at the ES-1 (the name of the product)
architecture you will see that it is basically "killer micros" all
connected together through shared memory running Mach.  It is NOT a vector
optimized machine.

The fact that the "killer micros" keep getting more powerful says something
for custom design.  What do you think they make the microprocessors out of?
Surely not gate arrays.

] 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.

That depends on what your custom architecture is; building a custom
architecture doesn't necessarily mean that somebody with 5 micros under
their arm is going to blow your pants off.

						-- Rich
Rich Thomson	thomson@cs.utah.edu  {bellcore,hplabs,uunet}!utah-cs!thomson
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with
us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain
too cheap, we esteem too lightly." Thomas Paine, _The Crisis_, Dec. 23rd, 1776