Several small and innovative companies in the minisupercomputer field have fallen by the wayside, but the shakeout in the market has now hit the first major: Prime Computer Inc has decided to get out of what it sees as an over-competitive market and take a $5m bath on its venture, which involved marketing machines built by privately-held Cydrome Inc of Milpitas, California. The Natick, Massachusetts minimaker holds over 12% of Cydrome, and says that it is writing down its investment in the company. Prime warns that the write-down will bring net per share for the second quarter down to between 13 and 17 cents a share, compared with 32 cents this time last year. Cydrome launched its Cydra 5 minisupercomputer in January, characterising it as the first Directed Dataflow symmetrical multiprocessor, running the Cydrix 5.3 symmetrical multiprocessing version of Unix V.3, and Prime launched the machine as the MXCL 5 (CI No 853).
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