Microsoft Corp has been hiring supercomputer engineers – not to get into the supercomputer business but to apply their skills and techniques to the problems of bringing computer power to the consumer market. According to the New York Times, the company hired Craig Mundie, founder and chairman of the now-defunct Alliant Computer Systems Corp last December to head a new advanced consumer technology division, and in April and May, Mundie took on six hardware designers from Steve Chen’s failed Supercomputer Systems Inc. The feeling at Microsoft is that radically new hardware architectures will be needed for to provide the control for the embryonic interactive television business: they will have to approach supercomputer performance while costing no more than a few hundred dollars to build. We are at a point where the computer industry has a chance to push the reset button and start over, Mundie said, explaining why Microsoft should want supercomputer designers: these guys have lived at the limit.
