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Was at Multiflow (Yale spinoff with Josh Fisher and John O'Donnell) '85-90 and saw the VLIW problem up close (was in the OS group, eventually running it). The

by cpr 3y ago

Was at Multiflow (Yale spinoff with Josh Fisher and John O'Donnell) '85-90 and saw the VLIW problem up close (was in the OS group, eventually running it). The main problem was compiler complexity -- the hoped-for "junk parallelism" gains really never panned out (maybe 2-3X?), so the compiler was best when it could discover, or be fed, vector operations. But Convex (main competitor at the time) already had the "minisupercomputer vector" market locked up. So Multiflow folded in early '90 (I had already bailed, seeing the handwriting mural) after burning through $60M in VC, which was a record at the time, I believe.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago
And hilariously*, Convex was eventually eaten by HP. Though the PowerPC Altivec/Velocity engine always looked a lot like Parsec to me. The past lives on in weird places. [*] And by "hilariously," I mean "painfully."
- mkhnews 3y ago
  Was at Convex and then HP (and then Convey) and worked quite hard porting/optimizing numerical/scientific apps for the I2. Eventually, I think performance for some apps was ok, I mean considering a 900 Mhz clock and all.
pavlov 3y ago
Funny how today burning through that amount is entirely ordinary and expected for most startups working on much more trivial problems. Just the other day it was reported that Brex, an expense management SaaS, has a $17M / month burn rate. That’s almost $60M in one quarter.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  "Expected" I think people are just going happy-go-click-click in AWS panel and not auditing it correctly (And if AWS would release aws left-pad I'm sure some people would pay for it)
  - pavlov 3y ago
    When a technically rather mundane SaaS is losing $17 million cash every month, the AWS bill is probably a rounding error. It’s salaries and marketing.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  Not that it undermines your point much, but $60M (1990 resp. 1985) = $140M resp. $170M today. (I’m not good enough at this to correct for the interest rate differences as well.)
Taniwha 3y ago
I worked at Chromatic, we built a series of 2-wide VLIWs, writing a compiler (actually just the assembler) that could extract that parallelism was pretty easy, just some low level register flow analysis, I can imagine getting something like 6 way would be a lot harder though
gregw2 3y ago
Multiflow folded in early '90 but then in 1994 HP and Intel bet their futures on this? Convex (using HP PA-RISC no less, defeated Multiflow but HP still thought they could make it work? What was the nature of HP's misjudgement? They must have had a theory why Multiflow failed but they would succeed, no? I recall there was new research coming out of University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign that breathed new hope into this but would be curious why HP+Intel pursued it if Multiflow failed. I do recall HP brought a compiler team to the table and per wikipedia they had a research team working on VLIW since 1989. HP has an internal bakeoff of RISC vs VLIW but did it not capture the compiler challenges or workloads properly? Strategy wise, for a vendor (HP) looking to phase out their RISC investments while maintaining some degree of backwards compatibility and becoming first among equals of their RISC peers partnering with the market volume leader Intel it made great sense... but that only works if the technology pans out. Did HP management get seduced by a competitive strategic play and make a poor engineering/technical call? Or did the internal research team oversell itself even knowing about Multiflow? Or was it something else? Hindsight is 20/20 but what key assumption(s) went wrong that we can all learn from?

by cpr 3y ago

OhMeadhbh 3y ago

And hilariously*, Convex was eventually eaten by HP. Though the PowerPC Altivec/Velocity engine always looked a lot like Parsec to me. The past lives on in weird places. [*] And by "hilariously," I mean "painfully."

mkhnews 3y ago
Was at Convex and then HP (and then Convey) and worked quite hard porting/optimizing numerical/scientific apps for the I2. Eventually, I think performance for some apps was ok, I mean considering a 900 Mhz clock and all.

pavlov 3y ago

Funny how today burning through that amount is entirely ordinary and expected for most startups working on much more trivial problems. Just the other day it was reported that Brex, an expense management SaaS, has a $17M / month burn rate. That’s almost $60M in one quarter.

raverbashing 3y ago
"Expected" I think people are just going happy-go-click-click in AWS panel and not auditing it correctly (And if AWS would release aws left-pad I'm sure some people would pay for it)
- pavlov 3y ago
  When a technically rather mundane SaaS is losing $17 million cash every month, the AWS bill is probably a rounding error. It’s salaries and marketing.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
Not that it undermines your point much, but $60M (1990 resp. 1985) = $140M resp. $170M today. (I’m not good enough at this to correct for the interest rate differences as well.)

Taniwha 3y ago

I worked at Chromatic, we built a series of 2-wide VLIWs, writing a compiler (actually just the assembler) that could extract that parallelism was pretty easy, just some low level register flow analysis, I can imagine getting something like 6 way would be a lot harder though

gregw2 3y ago

Multiflow folded in early '90 but then in 1994 HP and Intel bet their futures on this? Convex (using HP PA-RISC no less, defeated Multiflow but HP still thought they could make it work? What was the nature of HP's misjudgement? They must have had a theory why Multiflow failed but they would succeed, no? I recall there was new research coming out of University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign that breathed new hope into this but would be curious why HP+Intel pursued it if Multiflow failed. I do recall HP brought a compiler team to the table and per wikipedia they had a research team working on VLIW since 1989. HP has an internal bakeoff of RISC vs VLIW but did it not capture the compiler challenges or workloads properly? Strategy wise, for a vendor (HP) looking to phase out their RISC investments while maintaining some degree of backwards compatibility and becoming first among equals of their RISC peers partnering with the market volume leader Intel it made great sense... but that only works if the technology pans out. Did HP management get seduced by a competitive strategic play and make a poor engineering/technical call? Or did the internal research team oversell itself even knowing about Multiflow? Or was it something else? Hindsight is 20/20 but what key assumption(s) went wrong that we can all learn from?