Another casualty of the fiercely competitive high-performance scientific Unix systems market looks like being San Diego-based Celerity Computing Inc. The five-year-old company formed by designers of the NCR 32 32-bit microprocessor slice shed 70% of its 100-strong workforce 10 days ago, but at the end of last week there was still no-one at the company prepared to explain any future plans. Celerity built a family of multiprocessor Unix systems around the microcodeable NCR 32 – but used the part as a RISC rather than adding a complex instruction set. It sold some 200 of the 1200, 1230 and 1260 systems and had still been making a few of them until the end of last month. But its major project was a new 64-bit processor, and unofficial word out of the company is that it intends to try to complete development of the new machine and then try to sell the assets of the company. The immediate reason for the shutdown, affecting 35 marketing and sales personnel, all the production workers and, most of the admin staff and about half the executive staff, was said to be non-availability of a key component.
