[HN Gopher] Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
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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...
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