Very Long Instruction Word processor specialist Multiflow Computers Inc, which closed its doors in March after the money ran out and a deal under which DEC was to have invested in the Branford, Connecticut company fell through, is aiming to complete a model liquidation, and is shopping its trace scehduling compilers around via non-exclusive licences in order to raise enough money to pay off all its debts. Intel Corp licensed the compilers for use on its Hypercube machines in return for a $4m investment in Multiflow months before the boom fell, and according to Electronic News, Hewlett-Packard Co has now agreed to pay about $1m for non-exclusive rights. It has already sold the maintenance contracts on its installed base to Bell Atlantic Corp, and DEC is believed to have come back for a licence to the compilers in an investment that will cost it a lot less than it would have had to pay to buy into the company as a going concern. The trace scheduling compilers are designed to keep all processors in a multiprocessor machine busy, and it is thought that they are adaptable to machines that can execute more than one instruction per cycle. Essentially, the technique requires the compiler to recognise which instructions are dependent on the results of the previous one and avoid scheduling parallel execution of such instructions, while letting others go.
