Sequent Computer Systems, or Sequent, was a computer company that designed and manufactured multiprocessing computer systems. They were among the pioneers in high-performance symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) open systems, innovating in both hardware (e.g. cache management and interrupt handling) and software (e.g. read-copy-update). Through a close partnership with Oracle Corporation that included the introduction of hardware and software optimiza...
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Sequent Computer Systems, or Sequent, was a computer company that designed and manufactured multiprocessing computer systems. They were among the pioneers in high-performance symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) open systems, innovating in both hardware (e.g. cache management and interrupt handling) and software (e.g. read-copy-update). Through a close partnership with Oracle Corporation that included the introduction of hardware and software optimizations[citation needed], Sequent became a dominant high-end UNIX platform in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later, after several corporate missteps, they returned to their roots, producing a next-generation high-end platform for UNIX and Windows NT based on a non-uniform memory access architecture, NUMA-Q. As hardware prices fell in the late 1990s, and Intel shifted their server focus to the Itanium processor family, Sequent found their market shrinking.[citation needed]
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