MasPar
Late-1980s supercomputer maker whose MP-1 packed up to 16,384 simple processors marching in lockstep — SIMD taken to its extreme.
Spun out of DEC in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The architecture was pure SIMD: thousands of stripped-down processors executed exactly the same instruction at once, each on its own slice of data, driven by a single control unit. The MP-1 (1990) scaled to 16,384 cores; the MP-2 went 32-bit.
It was the same idea as Thinking Machines' Connection Machine, and the two firms shared a fate: massively parallel hardware at a price only research labs and intelligence agencies would pay, undercut by cheap clusters of commodity processors. MasPar left hardware in 1996 and reinvented itself as the data-mining firm NeoVista. A dry lesson: special-purpose silicon almost always loses to raw volume in the end.