Both of the founding companies had formed in 1985, intending to address different market niches; Stellar concentrated on high-performance workstation type machines, while Ardent developed a custom vector processor that allowed it to compete with large supercomputers for graphics-related tasks.
[1] This company aimed to produce a workstation system with enough performance to be a serious threat to the Ardent Titan, and at a lower price.
Ardent responded by starting work on a new desktop system called Stiletto, which featured two MIPS R3000s (paired with two R3010 FPUs) and four i860s for graphics processing (the i860s replaced the vector units).
[2] An investment from Japanese company Mitsui and others was announced in June 1988, bringing the total capital raised to $48 million.
[3] At almost the same time, in November 1985, Allen H. Michels and Matthew Sanders III co-founded Dana Computer, Inc. in Sunnyvale, California.
The company sought to produce a desktop multiprocessing supercomputer dedicated to graphics that could support up to four processor units.
A second round of funding came from Kubota Corporation, a Japanese heavy industries company, which had cash to spare and was looking for new opportunities during the strong Yen period.
By the time it was finally ready for testing in February 1988, the performance leadership position of Titan had been eroded and the price had risen to $80,000.
[9] Kubota is alleged to have forced the merger; in an odd twist, the original Stellar group was left with most of the corporate power.
[15][16] In August 1991, Stardent spun off its popular Application Visualization System (AVS) software into a separate company.
By the end of the year, the company had given up on finding a buyer, believed to be Oki Electric, for the Vistra line of workstations but still hoped to sell the underlying graphics technology based on the Intel i860.
Its sales were estimated at only $40 million in 1990, which limited its ability to compete with other workstation manufacturers such as IBM, HP, and Silicon Graphics.
[21] Kubota Pacific cast about looking for direction, before finally settling on a desktop-sized 3D graphics accelerator for the Alpha-based DEC 3000 AXP workstations, called Denali.