January 27,1988

		GigaMOS Systems Software Product Report.


			Overview

	The purpose of this report is to set forth the status, options,
resource requirements and schedules of the Software effort of GigaMOS
Systems.  The unifying core of GigaMOS Systems is the provision of
hardware and software to support A.I. applications of the future.
(Although we expect that such hardware and software will prove useful
in many other situations as well of course.)  Our focus is on tagged
as opposed to conventional machines.  LISP, of course, is our primary
language, there may be some opportunity to come to terms with C as well.

			Background

	The primary hardware project of the company is the Falcon
project, sometimes also known as the K project.  The Falcon processor is
the only known processor designed after it became feasible to locate the
entire primary "core" memory on the processor board itself (as opposed
to communicating over a relatively narrow "bus").  Among known processor
designs, it is the only one to incorporate CALL Hardware, in which it
goes a step beyond the most advanced of the RISC machines.  In short,
these features and others give it a performance advantage of at least a
demonstrated factor of 3 in benchmarks as compared to the current market
leader for comparable machines (the TI Explorer II).  Since the E-II is
currently running with a clock almost twice as fast, it could be
reasonably argued that we have an architectural advantage of
approximately a factor of five.  (Note that TI's anticipated Mac II
board is only approximately one half as fast as the Explorer II).


		       Additional Background References

	Appendix 1 details the history of the AI computer
market.  A capsule summary is that circa 1980 tagged machines comming
out of MIT openned the market by introducing landmark improvements in
performance, ability to run large programs, and debugging enviroment.
In the last couple of years, conventional machines (SUN, DEC, etc) have
made headway at the expense of tagged machines, mainly due to
considerably lower prices (as much as a factor of 3 for comparable
hardware) and the promise of several companies whose mission was to
produce AI software for conventional machines (LUCID, FRANZ).  Also,
arbitrary limitations that disqualified earlier conventional machines
(notably address space restrictions and lack of virtual memory) have
been largely overcome, although the software picture for conventional
machines does remain murky in key respects.  Recently, a relentless
industry drive to agreed upon standards has become apparent.  At the
hardware level, white hot competition has resulted in outstanding
values for the purchasors of industry standard boxes, especially in
periphal equipment.  The resulting market forces are operating to
reduce the number of viable box vendors to approximately 4 (IBM-PC
(further divided into IBM PS/2 and Old-PC, Apple, DEC, and possibly
SUN).  Of these, the APPLE MAC-II has the most steam at the moment.
	We assume here some familiarity as to what a tagged machine is,
etc, and will not go into that here. (See appendix 1, ....)



			Statement of Objectives

	Our primary initial objective is to provide the Falcon with a
competitive basic software suit and operating system.  We intend to 
accomplish this in short order by porting the existing LAMBDA software
suite.  However, we recognize that much else is required as well.



Moby Address

Current Status

Path Ahead  (central issues)
  Central core
  "Lambda Compatibility"
  "TI Compatibility"
  New Standards and Systems.
    CLOS
    New Window System

Supporting Issues
  Networking