Most of those companies did command line or text IDE compilers for DOS. Just doing a DOS compiler wasn't too bad in terms of effort since DOS is a simple OS and the languages 20 years ago tended to be simpler. Today you have to add in Windows API support, a new version of Windows every couple of years, OOP, evolving language standards, and an IDE which is a major Windows application itself. The difficulty level has one through the roof.
The cell chips are interesting, but from the description they seem to be more of a variant of the current multi-core chips that Intel, Sun, HP, IBM, et. al, are doing. It sounds like they have the capability of putting more than one type of CPU on the same silicon, which is different, but it is still a variant of existing designs. It doesn't sound like they will be putting more than a hand full of cores on their chips. Sun is already talking about 8 cores on their new Throughput Computing chip line now, and more in the future. Sun claims that their Throughput computing chips will ultimately be 30x more powerful than what is out there today.
If you want to look at something really different, check out the Mathstar FPOA chips. Right now they can put up to 400 1Ghz processors / devices in different mixes on a single programmable chip. There will probably be a lot of applications that this will be a better match for than a multi-core IBM Power based chip, although in fairness they are probably targeted at different applications. On the other hand, maybe the FPOA will be the "IBM PC" of the multicore chip world. When the IBM PC first came out it was laughed at by the IT shops as being so small and limited, that it wasn't a "real computer". But the people who had PCs didn't have to wait weeks for the IT Department to rewrite their program, run their report, or crunch numbers for them on the mainframe. The PC changed the world. I wonder what the FPOA will do?
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Gone. (Watcom, Symantec, JPI, Utah, Marshall, Oregon, Stoney Brook, ...)
Most of those companies did command line or text IDE compilers for DOS. Just doing a DOS compiler wasn't too bad in terms of effort since DOS is a simple OS and the languages 20 years ago tended to be simpler. Today you have to add in Windows API support, a new version of Windows every couple of years, OOP, evolving language standards, and an IDE which is a major Windows application itself. The difficulty level has one through the roof.
The cell chips are interesting, but from the description they seem to be more of a variant of the current multi-core chips that Intel, Sun, HP, IBM, et. al, are doing. It sounds like they have the capability of putting more than one type of CPU on the same silicon, which is different, but it is still a variant of existing designs. It doesn't sound like they will be putting more than a hand full of cores on their chips. Sun is already talking about 8 cores on their new Throughput Computing chip line now, and more in the future. Sun claims that their Throughput computing chips will ultimately be 30x more powerful than what is out there today.
If you want to look at something really different, check out the Mathstar FPOA chips. Right now they can put up to 400 1Ghz processors / devices in different mixes on a single programmable chip. There will probably be a lot of applications that this will be a better match for than a multi-core IBM Power based chip, although in fairness they are probably targeted at different applications. On the other hand, maybe the FPOA will be the "IBM PC" of the multicore chip world. When the IBM PC first came out it was laughed at by the IT shops as being so small and limited, that it wasn't a "real computer". But the people who had PCs didn't have to wait weeks for the IT Department to rewrite their program, run their report, or crunch numbers for them on the mainframe. The PC changed the world. I wonder what the FPOA will do?