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Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

transputer.net

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Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#41

Post by jacquesm »

zozbot234 wrote: post #38
spacedcowboy wrote: post #2

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…

Modern multi-core computers all use an interconnect/network-on-a-chip to communicate across cores. Shared memory multiprocessing is built on top of that networked architecture, using cache coherence protocols. They also commonly use SMT which gives you the "virtual/logical cores", better known as hardware threads (harts).

> Modern multi-core computers all use an interconnect/network-on-a-chip to communicate across cores

These are nothing at all like the links that Transputers use to communicate internally.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#43

Post by jacquesm »

mk_stjames wrote: post #26

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.

To the right party those are probably worth quite a bit.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#44

Post by gnufx »

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.

> Not sure about Fortran.

There was -- used for scientific computing on things like the Meiko Computing Surface, though not by me.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#45

Post by gnufx »

ac50hz wrote: post #40
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.

Let's not forget the OS that the Atari Transputer Workstation used, HeliOS... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliOS https://github.com/axelmuhr/Helios-NG

I remember it being pretty interesting when the book (manual?) on it was passed round locally.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#47

Post by rwmj »

> The other product was the second test chip we had made for the transputer. We persuaded IBM to use this as their next generation graphic chip, and it became embedded in the PC as the SVGA standard. Some of the oddities in the present Windows operating system stem directly from the way this chip was designed to work with the transputer.

Anyone know more about this?

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#48

Post by UncleSlacky »

gnufx wrote: post #44
dboreham wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Not sure about Fortran. There was -- used for scientific computing on things like the Meiko Computing Surface, though not by me.

Yes, I was taught Fortran* which featured built-in parallel calculations for matrix operations (which fed into Fortran 90 IIRC) as well as Occam, and was allowed to play with the university's Meiko Computing Surface (generating fractal landscapes in real time) but not actually allowed to program them.

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#49

Post by PhillipT2014 »

zwieback wrote: post #11

I remember Transputer enthusiasm when I was in college, we got some boards and even built our own, but it was really not practical and the toolchains were lacking. Even back then it seemed like something more like the GPUs we have today with many cores per die would make more sense.

Yup the tool chain was a more than a wee bit painful. There was a lot of interest at that time in graphics applications of transputers - I remember seeing code for a parallel ray tracer (MAGG?) and there was Division Ltd - a spin off by folks from Inmos and Perehelion( makers of Helios OS used in the Atari transputer product), Ian Barron was chairman. Division built a very early VR system called ProVision[1] using transputers and later built general VR development software until their acquisition by PTC where they build digital mockup visualization tools. In many respects, at least for me, exposure to transputers and those companies gave a glimpse into what the GPU market would become.

https://www.cs.ru.ac.za/research/groups/vrsig/pastprojects/0...

Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)

#50

Post by omnivorist »

rwmj wrote: post #47

> The other product was the second test chip we had made for the transputer. We persuaded IBM to use this as their next generation graphic chip, and it became embedded in the PC as the SVGA standard. Some of the oddities in the present Windows operating system stem directly from the way this chip was designed to work with the transputer. Anyone know more about this?

This sounds very much like the Colour Lookup Table (CLUT)- a classic skunkworks project initiated by Gerry Talbot and Miles Chesney that 'proved' the capability of the nascent Inmos CAD system.
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