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Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

transputer.net

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Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#21

Post by dboreham »

__d wrote: post #19
lucb1e wrote: post #7

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?

Inmos was a British semiconductor company which made a series of CPUs it called Transputers in the late 1980s-early 1990s. 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 concurre…

Quick note that there were compilers for other languages. Definitely C. Probably Pascal. Not sure about Fortran.

I think the failure to keep the single-CPU performance edge was probably mostly about lack of money vs the competitors. Obviously related to not selling enough of the first generation chips.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#22

Post by __d »

dboreham wrote: post #21
__d wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inmos was a British semiconductor company which made a series of CPUs it called Transputers in the late 1980s-early 1990s. 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 concurre…

Quick note that there were compilers for other languages. Definitely C. Probably Pascal. Not sure about Fortran. I think the failure to keep the single-CPU performance edge was probably mostly about lack of money vs the competitors. Obviously related to not selling enough of the first generation chips.

There were: Rowley did Modula2, there was a GCC port, there was an Ada port, and various others, commercial and open source. But the Transputer architecture, which was stack-based, didn't lend itself to easy ports of most existing compilers, and they were slow to arrive and slow when they did.

The article also discusses the reasons for the lack of follow-on investment.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#23

Post by car »

car wrote: post #10

Atari actually built a Transputer workstation in 1989. Quite the curiosity when it was announced! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995277 Edit: Europe had a rather large Atari ST scene, since Macs were prohibitively expensive. So anything Atari got a lot of publicity. I remember reading a bunch of articles about the Transputer.

This 2021 HN post is about the Atari Transputer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26488501

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#24

Post by Qem »

lucb1e wrote: post #9
meindnoch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

> a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers

Sorta like Actor model, but in hardware?

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#25

Post by haeberli »

There was an Apple Mac (sub-) team visit to Inmos in the UK, hosted by Ian Barron, sometime circa 1982 - 1983. Bob Belleville, the Mac team's director of engineering, led the trip. I remember Ian had a Jaguar with twin fuel tanks, but told the story of how he forgot to refill the first one when it was empty, so sometime he totally ran out of fuel. JG (John Giannandrea), later of Netscape, was at Inmos around then. (He was at Apple last time I checked.)

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#26

Post by mk_stjames »

I have a drawer full of Inmos 32-bit chips that were pulled from a bunch of ISDN network diagnostic equipment. I've wanted for years to sit down and dig into their workings, come up with a little project or something, but... hasn't happened.

They are pretty though; gold pins and ceramic packages and all.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#27

Post by atrn »

Qem wrote: post #24
lucb1e wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers

Sorta like Actor model, but in hardware?

CSP. In hardware.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#28

Post by foruhar »

I had access to one of the development boards 1986/87. I was writing neural network code for my degree/dissertation and it was slow on the Sun 3 at the lab which was slower than the departmental Vax. I was writing in C (rather than the AI languages of the time) to get the most out of the machines we had and it was still overnight runs to train a network. The transputer was so seductive with its promise of parallel speed but I could not get my head around the Occam language and dev environment in time for my deadline. I still think of it fondly as a thing that I was happy to have bumped into however slightly since it went the way of so many ideas about how to build a computer with an eye on the pre-winter, mostly symbolic AI (Lisp machines, Connection Machine, Cray).

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#29

Post by cawest11 »

dboreham wrote: post #5

Iann Barron was put in charge of our group for a while. I thought he was incredibly old and wise, and the only person I knew with a Lamborghini, that he drove to work every day. Now I'm six years older than he was then. Not wise, no Lamborghini...

In your defense, it was probably wise to skip on the Lamborghini.
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