11–20 of 59 posts
Even back then it seemed like something more like the GPUs we have today with many cores per die would make more sense.
The spiritual successor to the transputer is a company called XMOS[1], which has some of the same original people behind the transputer there. You now tend to have multiple cores (virtual and physical, each virtual core is handled by time-slicing in hardware, and physical cores are other instances of the same) on a single chip-carrier, more memory, and embedded hard-cores for ethernet/USB but the concepts are pretty…
Still used in certain submarine sonar arrays (T9000).
The spiritual successor to the transputer is a company called XMOS[1], which has some of the same original people behind the transputer there. You now tend to have multiple cores (virtual and physical, each virtual core is handled by time-slicing in hardware, and physical cores are other instances of the same) on a single chip-carrier, more memory, and embedded hard-cores for ethernet/USB but the concepts are pretty…
The Tilera was also a spiritual successor in the 00's. Through an acquisition chain they ended up at Nvidia. The DPU compute cores are apparently derived from Tilera, which me kind of happy that it still survives in some form.
It's a shame that the on-chip network hasn't survived.
Still used in certain submarine sonar arrays (T9000).
I used the T4xx/T8xx series CPUs for a while, but never actually saw a working T9000 ...
FWIW, Go's channels were largely inspired by similar facilities in Occam.
Then there was a generation-long pause. Then Go!
FWIW, Go's channels were largely inspired by similar facilities in Occam.
See Limbo, Alef, Newsqueak, and Squeak.
Occam was also derived from CSP, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a direct ancestor to Go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language)
Can someone who read this article post a sentence (like just a headline) of what the article is actually about, like what an inmo or transputer is, without starting with a background life story and life goals like the article?
Transputers were novel in that they combined a CPU core with a set of high-speed network links: the CPU ran at, eg. 20MHz and the four network links at 20Mbps.
Paired with this hardware was the programming language Occam, which was derived from the ideas of Tony Hoare's CSP, and included concurrency and communications primitives that mapped directly onto the Transputer hardware.
The end result was a system in which it was easy to configure a parallel machine with a mesh, torus, or tree of CPUs that could then run CSP-style concurrent programs very effectively.
While it saw some success in various niches (image and signal processing, for instance), the Transputer CPUs did not support other popular languages of the time (C, Pascal, Fortran, etc) well, and for various reasons, Inmos was unable to evolve the design to match the performance of (in particular) the Intel x86 family. From an initial position of having competitive performance and superior concurrency and communication, the Transputer was quickly left behind, and its successor (the T9000-series) was obsolete before launch.