Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ted Foster who wrote (77520)	2/5/2000 2:29:00 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 97611

Ted - I think you are a little confused about wildfire, although correct that it has been a difficult birth. Wildfire was conceived as the replacement for the TurboLaser. It is a modular crossbar architecture - which means that base SMP modules (4 way in the case of Wildfire) are joined through a high-speed low-latency switch to make up larger SMP configurations. There are a number of advantages to this approach - there is no "big machine tax" since a user could start out with something as small as a single 4-way and add modules as needed, where traditional SMP architectures require the user to pay for the infrastructure to support the largest configuration, however small their initial system. Also this approach is easy to service and allows good fault tolerance - memory, processors, and even I/O can be dynamically re-allocated to replace failing components, or to match system resources to job loading. The architecture supports up to 256 processors and will support 1024 when the next round of Alpha chips is ready, but initial machines are limited to something less, 32 way I think. so far it appears to fall in the "vaporware" or "wheat from the Ukraine" category Wildfire was begun in 1994 and was supposed to come to market in 1997. Many things kept the design from being completed on time - the many special chips were being built at DEC's Hudson fab which was sold to Intel. Then DEC itself was sold to CPQ. And of course, the machine was so much more complex than anything DEC had done before that stuff just didn't work... but prototype machines have been running for a while and near-production quality stuff was shown at COMDEX... And apparently there is some tremendous gestation period required because Compaq decided to close the factory that was going to produce the hardware. According to the "Shannon Knows Compaq" newsletter, Wildfire was originally going to be built at the Alpha plant in Massachusetts. That was when a 1998 launch was planned... when the product launch was delayed a year, the plan was revised, as CPQ was moving Alpha assembly to the Tandem facility in California. The revised plan was to do the early production at the old Alpha plant, then the volume production in California. When the Wildfire schedule slipped again, CPQ moved all production, including early production, to the California plant.. That is apparently the reason that only "evaluation units" will be built in 1Q, since the new facility is still not fully up to speed. Wildfire software has been on the market for a number of years I don't know what you mean by this, there is no Wildfire software. Perhaps there is some other company with software called WIldfire but it has nothing to do with this product... maybe you could let me know what you meant here.