Cydrome
More info
- Creator
- Bob Rau, David Yen
- Released
- 1984–1988
- Type
- Minisupercomputer maker (VLIW)
The other 1984 VLIW startup — Bob Rau's modulo scheduling outlived the company and ended up in Itanium too.
Founded in 1984 in San Jose by Bob Rau and others. The Cydra 5 "departmental supercomputer" rested on the same audacious bet as Multiflow: let the compiler pack many operations into each instruction word. Rau's contribution was modulo scheduling (polycyclic scheduling), a method for software-pipelining loops that is still in use. The company barely shipped before the money ran out in 1988. Rau moved to HP Labs, where his work and Multiflow's eventually merged into HP and Intel's EPIC → Itanium. Two companies died so that the same lesson could become a chip a decade later.