Cydrome
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Cydrome (1984−1988) was a computer company established in San Jose of the Silicon Valley region in California. Its mission was to develop a numeric processor. The founders were David Yen, Wei Yen, Ross Towle, Arun Kumar, and Bob Rau (the chief architect).
History
The company was originally named ”Axiom Systems". However another company in San Diego called "Axiom" was founded earlier. Axiom Systems called its architecture "SPARC". It sold the rights to the name (but not the architecture) to Sun Microsystems and used the money to hire NameLab to come up with a new company name. They came up with "Cydrome" from "cyber" (computer) "drome" (racecourse).
Cydrome moved from an office in San Jose to a business park in
Late in its history, Cydrome received an investment from Prime Computers and OEMed the Cydra-5 through Prime. The system sold by Cydrome had white skins. The skins for the Prime OEM system was black. In the Summer of 1988 Prime was set to acquire Cydrome. At the last minute the board of Prime decided not to go through with the deal. That sealed the fate of Cydrome.
The company closed after roughly 4 years of operation in 1988. Many of the ideas in Cydrome were carried on in the Itanium architecture.
Product
In order to improve performance in a new instruction set architecture, the Cydrome processors were based on a very long instruction word (VLIW) containing instructions from parallel operations. Software pipelining in a custom Fortran compiler[1] generated code that would run efficiently.
The numeric processor
The numeric processor also incorporated memory management and consequently employed virtual memory concepts. The memory subsystem implemented a 64 way interleaved 4-port memory. To ensure that there would be no "hot spots" within the memory system, the addresses to the memory were hashed to spread the accesses evenly across the 64 way memory system.
It was implemented in
See also
- Glen Culler
- Floating Point Systems
- Multiflow
- Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
References
- ^ James C. Dehnert and Ross A Towle, "Compiling for the Cydra 5", The Journal of Supercomputing, 7 (1/2), 1993, pp. 181-227.
- ^ Gary R. Besk, David W. L. Yen and Thomas L. Anderson, "The Cydra 5 Minisupercomputer: Architecture and Implementation", The Journal of Supercomputing, 7 (1/2), 1993.