Hauppauge Computer Works

Hauppauge was co-founded by Kenneth Plotkin and Kenneth Aupperle, and became incorporated in 1982. Starting in 1983, the company followed Microway, the company that a year earlier provided the software needed by scientists and engineers to modify the IBM PC Fortran compiler so that it could transparently employ Intel 8087 coprocessors. The 80-bit Intel 8087 math coprocessor ran a factor of 50 faster than the 8/16-bit 8088 CPU that the IBM PC software came with. However, in 1982, the speed-up in floating-point-intensive applications was only a factor of 10 as the initial software developed by Microway and Hauppauge continued to call floating point libraries to do computations instead of placing inline x87 instructions inline with the 8088's instructions that allowed the 8088 to drive the 8087 directly. By 1984, inline compilers made their way into the market providing increased speed ups. Hauppauge provided similar software products in competition with Microway that they bundled with math coprocessors and remained in the Intel math coprocessor business until 1993 when the Intel Pentium came out with a built-in math coprocessor. However, like other companies that entered the math coprocessor business, Hauppauge produced other products that contributed to a field that is today called HPC - high-performance computing. The math coprocessor business rapidly expanded starting in 1984 with software products that accelerated applications like Lotus 1-2-3. At the same time the advent of the 80286 based IBM PC/AT with its 80287 math coprocessor provided new opportunities for companies that had grown up selling 8087s and supporting software. This included products like Hauppauge's 287 Fast/5, a product that took advantage of the 80287's design that used an asynchronous clock to drive its FPU at 5 MHz instead of the 4 MHz clocking provided by IBM, making it possible for the 80287s that came with the AT to be overclocked to 12 MHz. By 1987, math coprocessors had become Intel's most profitable product line bringing in competition from vendors like Cyrix whose first product was a math coprocessor faster than the new Intel 80387, but whose speed was stalled by the 80386 that acted as a governor. This is when Andy Grove decided it was time for Intel to recapture its channel to market opening up a division to compete with its math coprocessor customers that by this time included 47th Street Camera. The new Intel division, PCEO (the PC Enhancement Operation) came out with a product called "Genuine Intel Math Coprocessors". After playing around in the accelerator board business PCEO would settle down in the 80386 motherboard business originally selling a motherboard designed by one of its engineers as a home project that eventually ended up with a new division that today sells 40% of the motherboards used in high end PCs that find their way into products including Supercomputers, medical products, etc. Companies like Hauppauge and Microway that were impacted by their new competitor that made their living accelerating floating point applications being run on PCs followed suit by venturing into the Intel i860 vector coprocessor business: Hauppauge came out with an Intel 80486 motherboard that included an Intel i860 vector processor while Microway came out with add-in cards that had between one or more i860s. These products along with transputer-based add-in cards would eventually lead into what became known as HPC (high performance computing). HPC was actually initiated in 1986 by an English company, Inmos, that designed a CPU competitive with an Intel 80386/387 that also included four twisted pair high-speed interconnects that could communicate with other transputers and be linked to a PC motherboard making it possible to create distributed memory processing computers that could employ 32 processors with the same throughput as 32 Intel 386/387s operating in a single PC. The add-in card parallel processing business morphed from the transputer to the Intel i860 around 1989 when Inmos was purchased by STMicroelectronics that cut R&D funding eventually forcing companies that had entered the parallel processing business to shift to the Intel i860. The i860 was a vector processor with graphics extensions that could initially provide 50 megaflops of throughput in an era when an 80486 with an Intel 80487 peaked at half a megaflop and would eventually top out at 100 Megaflops making it as fast as 100 Inmos T414 transputers. Intel i860 add-in cards made it possible for as many as 20 Intel i860s to run in parallel and could be programmed using a software library similar to today's MPI libraries which today support distributed memory parallel processing in which servers sitting in 1U rack mount chassis that are essentially PCs provide the horsepower behind the majority of the world's supercomputers. This same approach could be employed using Hauppauge's motherboards connected by Gigabit Ethernet, something that was however first demonstrated using a wall of IBM RS/6000 PCs at the 1991 Supercomputing Conference. IBM's lead was quickly followed by academic users who realized they could do the same thing with much less expensive hardware by adapting their x86 PCs to run in parallel at first using a software library adapted from similar transputer libraries called PVM (parallel virtual machines) that would eventually morph into today's MPI. Products like the Intel i860 vector processor that could be employed both as a vector and graphics processor were end of life'd around 1993 at the same time that Intel introduced the Intel Pentium P5: a CISC processor that used CISC instructions that were pipelined into hard coded lower level RISC like primitives that provided the Pentium with a Superscalar architecture that also could execute the x87 FPU instruction set using a built in FPU that was essentially implemented using the scalar instructions of the i860 as well as a memory bus that provided a 400 MB/sec interface to memory that was borrowed from the i860 as well. This high speed bus played a crucial role in speeding up the most common floating point intensive applications that at this point in time used Gauss Elimination to solve simultaneous linear equations buy which today are solved using blocking and LU decomposition. The Intel Pentium, while good, did not provide enough floating point performance to compete with a 300 MHz DEC Alpha 21164 that provided 600 Megaflops in 1995. At the same point in time, Intel supercomputing had moved from the 50 MHz Intel i860XP that was six times slower than the Alpha 21164 to the special version of their Pentium that at 200 megaflops was only three times slower than the 21164. However, the impending speed upgrade of the Alpha to 600 MHz ultimately doomed the future of Intel supercomputing. Motherboards During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hauppauge produced motherboards for Intel 486 processors. A number of these motherboards were standard ISA built to fairly competitive price points. Some, however, were workstation and server-oriented, including EISA support, optional cache memory modules, and support for the Weitek 4167 FPU. Hauppauge also sold a unique motherboard, the Hauppauge 4860. This was the only standard PC/AT motherboard ever made with both an Intel 80486 and an Intel i860 processor (optional). While both required the 80486, the i860 could either run an independent lightweight operating system or serve as a more conventional co-processor. Hauppauge no longer produces motherboards, focusing instead on the TV card market. ==Product lines==