Ardent

Ardent was a graphics minicomputer manufacturing company, one of a very few 3rd parties to base their designs on the MIPS CPU's and the associated MIPS OS, using additional Intel i860's as graphics co-processors. The company went through a series of mergers and re-organizations and changed names several times as their venture capital funders attempted to find a market niche for their "graphics supercomputers". After a series of machines that were not particularily successful in the marketplace, they used parts of their design to create graphics subsystems for other workstations, notably DEC machines, but eventually shut down completely in February 1995.

Ardent started as Dana Computer in November 1985 in Silicon Valley, but they were forced to change their name to Ardent after they learned that the name Dana was already in use by a disk drive company. They aimed to produce a desktiop supercomputer dedicated to graphics, which could be used in parallel computing machines with up to four processors. Each processor consisted of a MIPS R3000 processor connedted to a custom vector processor with a whopping 8192 64-bit word registers that could be used in any way from 8192 1-word to 32 256-word registers. This compares to modern SIMD systems which allow for perhaps sixteen 128-bit registers with a small variety of addressing scemes.

Their business plan called for their Titan system to outperform anything in the market, to be ready for beta testing in July 1987, and sell at a price of around $50,000. By late 1986 it was clear their estimates were unrealistic, the machine was still not ready and considerably more development was needed. A second round of funding was provided by Kubota[?], a Japanese tractor manufacturer, who would provide production in Japan. By the time it was finally ready for testing in February 1988, the performance leadership position of Titan had been eroded, and the price had risen to $80,000.

At almost the same time, Stellar was forming in the Boston area from former Apollo Computers members, aiming to produce a workstation system of roughly the same power at the same price point. Ardent decided to fight back and started work on a new desktop design known as Stiletto, which included two MIPS R3000's (paired with two R3010 FPU's) and four i860's handing the graphics processing.

In 1989 Kubota forced a merger of the two to produce Stardent Computers. In an odd twist, the original Stellar group was left with most of the corporate power. A number of the Ardent people were less than happy with this move, and quit to form other companies. Other attempted to get Kubota to spin off the original development group as a new company called Comet, but nothing came of this.

In 1990 Stilleto was entering beta when the east-coast management decided to shut down the entire west coast office. Kubota finally saw the error of their ways, and attempted to get Stardent to continue development of Stilleto, and when they failed to do so, formed Kubota Pacific. However Stardent owned the rights to the Titan and Stilleto lines, so the new company had to develop new machines from scratch. However Stardent itself eventually goes bankrupt in late 1991 and sells the rights back to Kubota.

By this point SGI, originally a add-in board manufacturer for Sun Microsystems workstations has wrapped up the entire (small) graphics market. Kubota Pacific casts about looking for direction, before finally settling on an i860-based add-in card for DEC Alpha based machines, called Denali. Somewhere during this period the company changes names again, becoming Kubota Graphics Company.

Denali ended up being an excellent product, but sales are not enough to keep the company going. Kubota Graphics shut down in 1994.