Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
transputer.net
Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
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Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#2The 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 similar. There are still 'links' (both serial and low-digit-parallel), there's still the idea that everything is time-synchronised and deterministic. You no longer have to use Occam to program it though :)
I've used them a couple of times, for some things (time-dependence on the order of microseconds, not nanoseconds) they're pretty awesome, and they get used in the audio industry a lot. They're sort of halfway between an FPGA and a microcontroller, where you "write" a UART in code, and then send messages to it over the links from other cores (virtual or physical) to perform the UARTs job. Same for SPI, I2C etc. There's even an SDRAM controller written in software...
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#3Still used in certain submarine sonar arrays (T9000).
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#4In a way Inmos’s fate probably saved Arm. SGS Thomson was one of the companies Acorn spoke with when trying to find a home for the Acorn RISC Machine but having already bought Inmos there was no appetite. If they had bought it then the ISA might have survived but I’d be astonished if it were anywhere near as successful.
PS I used transputers in a financial modelling application in the late 1990s (PROPHET) where it was used to deliver cost effective floating point performance.
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#5Iann 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...
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#6FWIW, Go's channels were largely inspired by similar facilities in Occam.
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#7Can 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?
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#8Can 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?
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#9Can 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?
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
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#10Atari 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.