How a start-up tried – and failed – to take supercomputing world by storm

"It is possible for a small company to compete in the computer systems business," Reilly wrote. "There are some who will say that nobody can compete against 'commodity manufacturers.' Ignore them. … There are only two true commodities in the computer business: DRAMs and wafer area. Everybody pretty much pays the same price for DRAMs. Wafer area is what you make of it. If you insist on building giant 100W chips, life will be tough. But if you use the silicon wafer area for something new, different and efficient, a market will open up to you."

Leonard, who is working on some software ideas as he figures out what his next venture will be, says the SiCortex team made mistakes but that he'd "do it again in a minute."

"Of course I'd rather it hadn't ended the way it did, but it was a wonderful time," Leonard says. "There were lots of mistakes of various kinds. I can wish that we had been more aggressive technically. I can wish that we had pulled the schedule in tighter. There are lots of things that in hindsight I would prefer to do differently. I've never been on a project in which that wasn't true."Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin