Aviion (styled AViiON) was a series of computers from
Data General
Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicompute ...
that were the company's main product from the late 1980s until the company's server products were discontinued in 2001. Earlier Aviion models used the
Motorola 88000
The 88000 (m88k for short) is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola during the 1980s. The Motorola 88100, MC88100 arrived on the market in 1988, some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS architecture, MIPS. Due to the ...
CPU, but later models moved to an all-
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
solution when
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...
stopped work on the 88000 in the early 1990s. Some versions of these later Intel-based machines ran
Windows NT
Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system.
The first version of Win ...
, while higher-end machines ran the company's flavor of Unix,
DG/UX
DG/UX is a discontinued Unix operating system developed by Data General for its Eclipse MV minicomputer line, and later the AViiON workstation and server line (both Motorola 88000 and Intel IA-32-based variants).
Overview
DG/UX 1.00, released in ...
.
History
Data General had, for most of its history, essentially mirrored the strategy of
DEC with a competitive (but, in the spirit of the time, incompatible)
minicomputer with a better
price/performance ratio. However, by the 1980s, Data General was clearly in a downward spiral relative to DEC. With the performance of custom-designed minicomputer
CPU's dropping relative to commodity microprocessors, the cost of developing a custom solution no longer paid for itself. A better solution was to use these same commodity processors, but put them together in such a way to offer better performance than a commodity machine could offer.
With Aviion, DG shifted its sight from a purely proprietary minicomputer line to the burgeoning
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
server market. The new line was based around the
Motorola 88000
The 88000 (m88k for short) is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola during the 1980s. The Motorola 88100, MC88100 arrived on the market in 1988, some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS architecture, MIPS. Due to the ...
, a high performance
RISC processor with some support for
multiprocessing and a particularly clean architecture. The machines ran a
System V
Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...
Unix variant known as
DG/UX
DG/UX is a discontinued Unix operating system developed by Data General for its Eclipse MV minicomputer line, and later the AViiON workstation and server line (both Motorola 88000 and Intel IA-32-based variants).
Overview
DG/UX 1.00, released in ...
, largely developed at the company's
Research Triangle Park facility. DG/UX had previously run on the company's family of
Eclipse MV 32-bit minicomputers (the successors to Nova and the 16-bit
Eclipse minis) but only in a very secondary role to the Eclipse MV mainstay
AOS/VS and
AOS/VS II operating systems. Also, some Aviion servers from this era ran the proprietary
MEDITECH MAGIC operating system.
From February 1988 to October 1990,
Robert E. Cousins was the Department Manager for workstation development. During this time they produced the Maverick project and several follow-ons including the 300, 310 and 400 series workstations along with the 4000 series servers.
[https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=686992&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=fQHC&locale=en_US&srchid=2889334381422461218567&srchindex=1&srchtotal=83&trk=vsrp_people_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A2889334381422461218567%2CVSRPtargetId%3A686992%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary ]
Aviion were released in a variety of sizes beginning in the summer of 1989. They debuted as a
pizza box
The pizza box or pizza package is a folding packaging box made of cardboard in which hot pizzas are stored for take-out. The "pizza box" also makes home delivery and takeaway substantially easier. The pizza box has to be highly resistant, c ...
workstation (codenamed "Maverick"
) and a server in both roller-mounted and rackmount flavors ("Topgun"). Speed-bumped and scaled-up versions followed, culminating in, first, the 16-CPU AV/9500 server and then the up to 32-way AV 10000 server in 1995, DG's first implementation of a
Non-Uniform Memory Access
Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessing, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to the processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non ...
(NUMA) design. Workstations remained part of the line for a time, but the emphasis increasingly shifted towards servers.
In 1992, Motorola joined the
AIM alliance to develop "cut down" versions of the
IBM POWER CPU design into a single-chip CPU for desktop machines, and eventually stopped further development of the 88000. Because of this, DG gave up working with Motorola, and decided instead to align its efforts with what was soon to become the clear winner in volume microprocessors, and used
i386
The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors[Pentium
Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium processor from which the brand took its name was first released on March 22, 1993. After that, the Pentium II and P ...]
, and later on faster
Pentium Pro
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686) and was originally intended to replace the original ...
,
Pentium II
The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture (" P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256 KB ...
and
Pentium III
The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999. The brand's initial ...
Xeon
Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same a ...
CPUs. This more commoditized hardware approach also led DG to develop NUMA servers that added a memory-coherent interconnect (
Scalable Coherent Interconnect
The Scalable Coherent Interface or Scalable Coherent Interconnect (SCI), is a high-speed interconnect standard for shared memory multiprocessing and message passing. The goal was to scale well, provide system-wide memory coherence and a simple in ...
(SCI)) to "standard high-volume" x86 motherboards sourced from Intel.
Sequent Computer Systems
Sequent Computer Systems was a computer company that designed and manufactured multiprocessing computer systems. They were among the pioneers in high-performance symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) open systems, innovating in both hardware (e.g., ca ...
, now part of
IBM, was following a similar strategy at the time. A system codenamed "Manx" was an earlier NUMA effort based on the original Pentium and Zenith hardware, but it was never brought to market. The AV 20000 ("Audubon") connected to 32 Pentium Pro processors (on up to eight quad-processor building blocks) in this manner; the later AV 25000 ("Audubon 2") upgrade expanded this to 64 Pentium II (later Pentium III) Xeons.
Based on the burgeoning popularity of Windows NT, Intel-based Aviion servers also added
Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
to their OS roster across the Aviion x86 line. It ended up contributing a significant percentage of revenues at the low-end, especially among existing DG customers who had made a decision to switch to NT. However, at the high-end, although Windows NT could run efficiently on single-block (i.e. quad-processor) building blocks in NUMA servers, it did not at the time have the
processor
Processor may refer to:
Computing Hardware
* Processor (computing)
**Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program
*** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...
and memory affinity optimizations that are required to achieve high performance on larger systems. As a result, Windows on DG NUMA servers was always more of a marketing story than a technical reality.
Around the same time, DG was also aggressively working towards an "industry standard" Unix operating system with the
Santa Cruz Operation
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO, pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants ...
and others. However, first with SCO's Data Center Acceleration Program (DCAP), and then
Project Monterey
Project Monterey was an attempt to build a single Unix operating system that ran across a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, as well as supporting multi-processing. Announced in October 1998, several Unix vendors were involved; IBM provide ...
, this never came to pass. Ultimately, DG's NUMA servers ended up as just another large-scale proprietary Unix server at a time when the industry was coalescing around the Unix platform variants of just a few large vendors —
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
(later acquired by HP),
HP,
IBM, and
Sun Microsystems.
In 1999,
EMC purchased Data General for 1.2 billion dollars primarily to gain access to its
CLARiiON line of disk array storage products and associated software. Under the terms of the "pooling of interests merger," EMC maintained the server line for two years, but discontinued it as soon as the terms of the deal allowed, at which point Aviion disappeared.
Notes
The name "AViiON" has often been claimed to be an
anagram of "Nova II", the
Nova being one of DG's most successful products. An employee competition was held to choose a name for the new line, but none of the suggestions was found to be acceptable for trademarking purposes. Given that early codenames for Eclipse systems included The Bird and The Big Bird, a reference to flight seemed appropriate. "Avion" had been suggested, but lacked the ability to be trademarked. At that time, two European companies had created a naming trend using repeated vowels -
Baan and
BiiN
BiiN was a company created out of a joint research project by Intel and Siemens to develop fault tolerant high-performance multi-processor computers build on custom microprocessor designs. BiiN was an outgrowth of the Intel iAPX 432 multiprocesso ...
. Avion was modified by repeating the 'i' and making the rest of the word uppercase as AViiON. (''Avion'' (or ''avión'') is the word for "aircraft" in French and Spanish.)
The use of the "ii" was carried through to the CLARiiON and THiiN Line product lines.
References
External links
The m88k Resource: Data General AViiONAllen Briggs' Data General AViiON informationAviion at m88k.orgUnorganized collection of 88k AViiON technical information
{{Data General
Computer workstations
Data General computers
32-bit computers