BiiN

BiiN was a company created out of a joint research project by Intel and Siemens to develop fault tolerant high-performance multi-processor computers build on custom microprocessor designs. BiiN was an outgrowth of the Intel iAPX 432 multiprocessor project, ancestor of iPSC and nCUBE.

The company was closed down in October 1989, and folded in April 1990, with no significant sales. The whole project was considered within Intel to have been so poorly managed that the company name was considered to be an acronym for Billions Invested In Nothing. However, several subset versions of the processor designed for the project were later offered commercially as versions of the Intel i960, which became popular as an embedded processor in the mid-1990s.

BiiN began in 1982 as Gemini, a research project equally funded by Intel and Siemens. The project's aim was to design and build a complete system for so-called "mission critical" computing, such as on-line transaction processing, industrial control applications (such as managing nuclear reactors), military applications intolerant of computer down-time, and national television services. The central themes of the R&D effort were to be transparent multiprocessing and file distribution, dynamically switchable fault tolerance, and a high level of security. Siemens provided the funding through its energy division UBE (Unternehmensbereich Energietechnik), who had an interest in fault tolerant computers for use in nuclear installations, while Intel provided the technology, and the whole project was organised with alternate layers of Siemens and Intel management and engineers. Siemens staff stemmed from its various divisions, not just UBE (where the project unit was called E85G). The core development labs were located on an Intel site in Portland, OR, but there were also Siemens labs in Berlin, Germany, (Sietec Systemtechnik, Maxim Ehrlich's team creating the Gemini DBMS), Vienna, Austria, Princeton, New Jersey (United States) and also Nuremberg, Germany, involved in the development.

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