Multiflow
More info
- Creator
- Josh Fisher, John O'Donnell, John Ruttenberg
- Released
- 1984–1990
- Type
- Minisupercomputer maker (VLIW)
The VLIW pioneer whose wide instruction words and trace-scheduling compiler pointed straight at Itanium — a decade too early.
Founded in 1984 by Josh Fisher and colleagues out of Yale. The TRACE machines ran Very Long Instruction Word: a single instruction word issued up to 28 operations at once, and all the parallelism was found by the compiler — using Fisher's own trace scheduling — rather than by hardware at run time. The idea was sound, but the minisupercomputer market collapsed and the company folded in 1990 after shipping around 125 machines. Its patents and people were absorbed by Hewlett-Packard and Intel, whose work later converged into the EPIC architecture behind Itanium. Multiflow was right — just in the wrong decade.