Encore Computer
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Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market. They offered a number of designs starting in 1985, but being German they never became as well known as the other pioneers of this field, namely Pyramid, Alliant and Sequent.
Encore started in 1983 to build massively-parallel machines from commodity processors. Their first design, the Multimax, was released late in 1985. This was one of the first commercial designs to make use of the Cache Snooping idea, allowing many processors to share the same memory efficiently. The Multimax could support from 1 to 20 30MHz NEC NS32032 processors, a 32-bit CISC design that was similar to the Motorola 68000 in most ways. A 50MHz speed-bumped version of the NS32032 led to the Multimax 500 in 1989, which was otherwise identical. Both machines ran a version of Unix modified for parallel computing. However soon after releasing the 500, NEC stopped development of the NS32032 design.
In 1988 Encore purchased what was originally known (from 1961) as Systems Engineering Laboratories, who built high-performance electronics systems for industrial monitoring and control purposes. In 1980 SEL had been purchased by Gould Electronics, which was in turn purchased by Nippon Mining in 1988. The new owners were not terribly interested in SEL, and Encore was able to buy them.
Encore then turned, as did most of the market, to RISC-based CPUs. Like Pyramid, they chose the Motorola 88000, and released the Encore-91 in late 1991, supporting two (the 9102) or four (the 9104) CPU's running at 25MHz. A bottom-up redesign for the new processor led to the Infinity 90 series, starting with the Infinity 90/ES in 1994. The ES supported between 2 and 2045 88110 CPU's running at 50MHz. Several newer machines in the Infinity 90 series were released, but history repeated itself and Motorola dropped development of the 88000 series in order to concentrate on the PowerPC.
Trying again, this time in the high-performance real-time market, Encore turned to the DEC Alpha design to create the Infinity R/T series which first shipped in late 1994. By this point the massively-parallel market was being encroached on by machines made up of large numbers of commodity machines, and Encore released a single-CPU workstation running OSF/1, the Series 90 RT 3000. It was intended to be used either standalone, or as a node in a massively-parallel machine.
Encore also worked on a modified RISC design known as the RSX. This was intended to operate in two modes, one as a normal CPU node for clusters, and in a CONCEPT/32 compatibility mode which emulated earlier custom hardware from the realtime side of the company. Encore continues to offer upgrade paths for their earlier systems, some of which date back to 1975.
Parts of the computing-side of the company were sold off over the years, with the last major spin-off being their Storage Products Group, sold to Sun Microsystems in 1997. This left the company consisting primarily of their real-time group, the original SEL core, and returned to this business niche after renaming themselves Encore Real Time Computing.
External links
- Encore Real Time Computing (http://www.encore.com/)