Stardent Computer

Stardent Computer, Inc. was a manufacturer of graphics supercomputer workstations in the late 1990s. It was formed from two previous companies, Ardent Computer Corporation and Stellar Computer Inc. that were started in the late 1980s.

Stellar Computer was founded in 1985 in Newton, Massachusetts, US, and headed by William Poduska, who had founded Prime Computer and Apollo Computer. This company aimed to produce a workstation system with enough performance to be a serious threat to the Titan, and at a lower price. Ardent responded by starting work on a new desktop system called Stiletto, which featured two MIPS R3000s (paired with two R3010 FPUs) and four i860s for graphics processing (the i860s replaced the vector units). Their first product was demonstrated in March 1988. An investment from Japanese company Mitsui and others was announced in June 1988, bringing the total capital raised to $48 million.

At almost the same time, during November 1985, Ardent Computer Corporation started out as Dana Computer, Inc. Founded by both Alan H. Michaels and Matthew Sanders III to develop similar products, Ardent Computer Corp. was based in Sunnyvale, California, US, part of Silicon Valley. Their aim was to produce a desktop multiprocessing supercomputer dedicated to graphics that could support up to four processor units. Each processor unit consisted initially of a MIPS R2000 CPU, and later a R3000, connected to a custom vector processor. The vector unit held 8,192 sixty-four-bit registers that could be used in any way from 8,192 one-word to thirty-two 256-word registers. This compares to modern SIMD systems which allow for perhaps eight to sixteen 128-bit registers with a small variety of addressing schemes.

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