Cydrome (1984–1988) was a computer company established in San Jose of the

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

region in

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. Its mission was to develop a numeric processor. The founders were David Yen,

Wei Yen Wei Yen () is a Taiwanese-American technologist and entrepreneur known for his contributions to computer graphics and consumer electronics. He has founded or led several technology companies, including ArtX, iQue, and AiLive, and has held exe ...

, Ross Towle, Arun Kumar, and

Bob Rau Bantwal Ramakrishna "Bob" Rau (1951 – December 10, 2002) was a computer engineer and HP Fellow. Rau was a founder and chief architect of Cydrome, where he helped develop the Very long instruction word technology that is now common in modern comp ...

(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 Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

and used the money to hire NameLab to come up with a new company name. They came up with "Cydrome" from "cyber" (computer) and "drome" (racecourse). Cydrome moved from an office in San Jose to a business park in

Milpitas Milpitas (Spanish for or little cornfields) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, part of Silicon Valley and the broader San Francisco Bay Area. Located on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, it is bordered by San Jose to the south, ...

on President's Day 1985. This site was used to host meetings of the Bay Area ACM chapter's Special Interest Group in Large Scale Systems (SIGBIG), in contrast to then SIGSMALL for microcomputers, which are now called "PCs," and its present-day national SIGHPC. Late in its history, Cydrome received an investment from

Prime Computer Prime Computer, Inc. was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. With the advent of Personal computer, PCs and the decline of the minicomputer industry, Prime was forced out of the market in the early 1990s, ...

s and OEMed the Cydra-5 through Prime. The system sold by Cydrome had white skins. The skins for the Prime OEM system were 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 Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...

architecture.

Product

In order to improve performance in a new

instruction set architecture In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model that generally defines how software controls the CPU in a computer or a family of computers. A device or program that executes instructions described by that ISA, ...

, the Cydrome processors were based on a

very long instruction word Very long instruction word (VLIW) refers to instruction set architectures that are designed to exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP). A VLIW processor allows programs to explicitly specify instructions to execute in parallel, whereas conve ...

(VLIW) containing instructions from parallel operations.

Software pipelining In computer science, software pipelining is a technique used to optimize loops, in a manner that parallels hardware pipelining. Software pipelining is a type of out-of-order execution, except that the reordering is done by a compiler (or in the ...

in a custom Fortran compiler generated code that would run efficiently. The numeric processorGary 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. used a 256 bit-wide instruction word with seven "fields". In most cases the compiler would find instructions that could run in parallel and place them together in a single word. It also had a special mode where each of the operations could be executed sequentially. It implemented register rotation to aid in

software pipelining In computer science, software pipelining is a technique used to optimize loops, in a manner that parallels hardware pipelining. Software pipelining is a type of out-of-order execution, except that the reordering is done by a compiler (or in the ...

of loops. There was an

instruction cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which ...

only, since it was felt that a

data cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which ...

would be inefficient on

sparse array In numerical analysis and scientific computing, a sparse matrix or sparse array is a matrix in which most of the elements are zero. There is no strict definition regarding the proportion of zero-value elements for a matrix to qualify as sparse ...

operations. The numeric processor also incorporated

memory management Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of Resource management (computing), resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory manag ...

and consequently employed

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a ver ...

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 ECL running at 25 MHz. Major functional modules were implemented using AMCC ECL

ASIC An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficien ...

s. The project grew beyond its original definition to include a front-end general-purpose processor ensemble based on the multiple

68020 The Motorola 68020 is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. A lower-cost version was also made available, known as the 68EC020. In keeping with naming practices common to Motorola designs, the 68020 is usually referred to as t ...

processors running

Unix System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

. The numeric processor ran a small kernel that would allow it to receive job submissions from the Unix system. The initial machine was dubbed the Cydra-5 and nine systems (three prototypes plus six production units) were built. In 1987, the machine saw its first public appearance at the first Supercomputer Conference held in Santa Clara, CA. A sample Cydra-5 is in storage at the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

References

{{Reflist 1984 establishments in California 1988 disestablishments in California American companies established in 1984 American companies disestablished in 1988 Companies based in Milpitas, California Companies based in San Jose, California Computer companies established in 1984 Computer companies disestablished in 1988 Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer systems companies Supercomputers Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Technology companies established in 1984 Technology companies disestablished in 1988 Very long instruction word computing

History

Product

See also

References