[HN Gopher] Inmos and the Transputer (1998) ___________________________________________________________________ Inmos and the Transputer (1998) Author : ferman Score : 37 points Date : 2023-02-26 20:13 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.transputer.net) (TXT) w3m dump (www.transputer.net) | nickdothutton wrote: | Still used in certain submarine sonar arrays (T9000). | johndoe0815 wrote: | So that's where all of the T9000s went? According to Wikipedia, | the project was cancelled. | __d wrote: | Do you have any further information about this? | | I used the T4xx/T8xx series CPUs for a while, but never | actually saw a working T9000 ... | car wrote: | 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. | zwieback wrote: | 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. | lucb1e wrote: | 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? | meindnoch wrote: | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer | lucb1e wrote: | > 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 | timthorn wrote: | From 1986, a 5 minute segment from BBC Micro Live on the | Transputer: | https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/865da57d1a0039e80fe68ac2624374c4 | kitd wrote: | FWIW, Go's channels were largely inspired by similar facilities | in Occam. | leashless wrote: | That's what got me into Go! I'd been exposed to transputers | around 1990s when I was a teenager, got really into CSP as a | way of thinking about programming. | | Then there was a generation-long pause. Then Go! | __d wrote: | I think Go's channels came largely from Tony Hoare's CSP, via a | series of languages and experiences within the Bell Labs group | that also produced Unix and Plan9. | | 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) | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language) | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsqueak | spacedcowboy wrote: | 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 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... | | 1: https://www.xmos.ai | yvdriess wrote: | 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. | __d wrote: | Which seems odd: the cores seemed to me to be the least | interesting aspect of the Tilera CPUs. | | It's a shame that the on-chip network hasn't survived. | klelatti wrote: | In 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. | dboreham wrote: | 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... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-02-26 23:00 UTC)