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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computers |
| Founded | 1982; 43 years ago (1982) |
| Defunct | 1990 (1990) |
| Fate | Liquidation |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Number of employees | 300[1] (1989) |
| Parent | Intel andSiemens |
BiiN Corporation was a company created out of a joint research project byIntel andSiemens to developfault tolerant high-performancemulti-processorcomputers build on custommicroprocessor designs. BiiN was an outgrowth of theIntel iAPX 432multiprocessor project, ancestor ofiPSC andnCUBE.
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 forBillions Invested In Nothing. However, several subset versions of the processor designed for the project were later offered commercially as versions of theIntel i960, which became popular as anembedded processor in the mid-1990s.
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BiiN began in 1982 asGemini, 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-linetransaction processing,industrial control applications (such as managingnuclear reactors), military applications intolerant of computerdowntime, and national television services. The central themes of the R&D effort were to be transparent multiprocessing and file distribution, dynamically switchablefault tolerance, and a high level of security. Siemens provided the funding through its energy divisionUBE (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 justUBE (where the project unit was calledE85G).The core development labs were located on an Intel site inPortland, OR, but there were also Siemens labs inBerlin, Germany, (Sietec Systemtechnik, Maxim Ehrlich's team creating the Gemini DBMS),Vienna, Austria,Princeton, New Jersey (United States) and alsoNuremberg, Germany, involved in the development.
Since neither Siemens nor Intel could see how to market this new architecture if it were broken up, in 1985 the project becameBiiN Partners, and in July 1988 was launched as a company wholly owned by Intel and Siemens. A second company wholly owned by Intel, calledBiiN Federal Systems, was also created in order to avoid Foreign Ownership and Controlling Interest (FOCI) problems in selling to the US government. Intel owned all the silicon designs which were licensed to Siemens, while Siemens owned all the software and documentation and licensed them to Intel.
BiiN aimed their designs at the high-end fault tolerant market, competing withTandem Computers andStratus Computer, as opposed to theparallel processing market, whereSequent Computer Systems,Pyramid Technology,Alliant Computer Systems and others were operating. In order to compete here they had to make sure their first designs were as powerful as the best from the other vendors, and by the time such a system was ready both Intel and Siemens had spent about $300 million with no shipping units.
In 1989 Siemens underwent a reorganization, which broughtUBE's own computer division into the mix. They had long been working withSequent Computer Systems, and were sceptical that the BiiN systems would deliver anything that the Sequent systems could not. Eventually Intel and Siemens could not agree on further funding, and the venture ended. Several pre-orders on the books were cancelled, and the technology essentially disappeared.
With the closing of the project, Intel used the basic RISC core of theCPU design as the basis for thei960 CPU. For this role most of the "advanced" features were removed, including the complex tagged memory system, task control system, most of themicrocode and even theFPU.[dubious –discuss] The result was a "naked" core, useful forembedded processor use. Before Intel switched to theStrongARM for the embedded role in the late 1990s, thei960 was one of Intel's most popular products.
One odd historical footnote is thatHughes Aircraft had licensed the silicon designs for use in the Advanced Tactical Fighter (now theF-22 Raptor), where it apparently continues to be used today.
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Key to the BiiN system was the960 XA processor,[2] essentially aRISC-based version of the earlieri432. Like thei432[citation needed], the 960 XA included tagged memory for completememory protection even within programs (as opposed to most CPU's, which offer protection only between programs), a full set of instructions fortask control, and complex microcode to run it all.
Unlike thei432, the 960 XA had fairly good performance, mostly as a side effect of dramatically reducing the complexity of the coreinstruction set, integration of all CPU functions on a single chip, and including an FPU. The CPUs were hosted on cards that included an I/O support CPU and either 8 to 16MB ofRAM.
Two systems were designed, theBiiN 20 was an entry-level machine with one or two processors, and an interesting battery-backeddisk-cache. The largerBiiN 60 was similar, but supported up to eight CPUs. Both machines could be used in larger multi-machine systems.
One interesting feature of the BiiN was that the CPU sets could be used to provide either fault tolerance, as in the Tandem systems, or parallel processing, as in the Pyramid and Sequent systems. This allowed users to tailor their systems to their needs, even on the fly. The BiiN systems also provided two versions of fault tolerance. Infault-checking mode, processors were paired so that they could check one another's calculations. In event of an error, the processors would stop, and the circuitry would determine which was faulty. This processor would then be excluded from the system, and the computer would restart. Incontinuous operation mode the fault-checking pairs were duplicated, so that if an error occurred the second pair could immediately take over the calculations.
Also of historical note was that theoperating system (OSIRIS), applications, development tools, and every other piece of BiiN software was written exclusively inAda — perhaps the largest non-military use of thatprogramming language.
There was acommand line interpreterCLI, that resembled a lot command shells' functionality only a couple of years later, like editable history and so forth.[dubious –discuss]Documentation for Gemini was done introff with a project proprietary set of macros or with theScribe markup language.
Development for Gemini happened onVAXes runningBSD Unix.
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