Hi Babbage, yes the parallel architecture model and the overlay of Occam's processes onto the multi-proc h/w was ingenious and as I say, well ahead of its time. Also, not to be underestimated was the class leading nature of a 20Mbit serial link in the 80s! Use of this formed the basis of my degree project and found its way into avionics hardware in the 90s. The legacy lives on though - amongst others, one major success was the use of the 32bit T424 core in what became the ST20, which found it's way into a very large number of settop boxes in Europe. That core is now widely embedded elsewhere too. Happy days! What did you work on? That would be amusing if so!
Hi Andrew, Thanks - that's really interesting on the serial link. I should have a closer look the ST20 too!
I'm not sure precisely what hardware it used but in the mid-1990s I used an insurance modelling package called Prophet that performed thousands of parallel simulations. There was a 'Transputer Box' option where it would distribute the simulations across a box of transputers attached to a desktop PC. The key benefit was massively accelerated (double precision I think) floating point performance in the Pentium / Pentium Pro era. In the end just piling up PCs provided more performance per £ and so the Transputer option was abandoned.
Very fond memories of being one two Field Application Engineers with Inmos in the UK - helping customers design and develop their Transputer based systems. Fascinating times and, in hindsight Inmos and our parallel processing architecture was elegant, class leading, and well ahead of its time.
What a great blast from the past! I remember memorizing the t800 Inmos instruction set and the link between chips was amazing especially because you could load your bootstrap code over it. Years later I was surprised to find a t225 in a serial console server I picked up at auction. What a weird application for that chip!
Hi! Thanks so much for commenting. It's amazing where Transputers ended up being used. I love the 'bootstrap load' feature too. Can you still remember the ISA?
I don't .. it was a long time ago but I still have 'the transputer book' somewhere..
I later moved on to the i860 vector processor and *again* the transputer showed up on a hybrid system .. the only reference I can find is a paid for article
Personal supercomputing by using transputer and Intel 80860 in plasma
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Hi Babbage, yes the parallel architecture model and the overlay of Occam's processes onto the multi-proc h/w was ingenious and as I say, well ahead of its time. Also, not to be underestimated was the class leading nature of a 20Mbit serial link in the 80s! Use of this formed the basis of my degree project and found its way into avionics hardware in the 90s. The legacy lives on though - amongst others, one major success was the use of the 32bit T424 core in what became the ST20, which found it's way into a very large number of settop boxes in Europe. That core is now widely embedded elsewhere too. Happy days! What did you work on? That would be amusing if so!
Hi Andrew, Thanks - that's really interesting on the serial link. I should have a closer look the ST20 too!
I'm not sure precisely what hardware it used but in the mid-1990s I used an insurance modelling package called Prophet that performed thousands of parallel simulations. There was a 'Transputer Box' option where it would distribute the simulations across a box of transputers attached to a desktop PC. The key benefit was massively accelerated (double precision I think) floating point performance in the Pentium / Pentium Pro era. In the end just piling up PCs provided more performance per £ and so the Transputer option was abandoned.
Very fond memories of being one two Field Application Engineers with Inmos in the UK - helping customers design and develop their Transputer based systems. Fascinating times and, in hindsight Inmos and our parallel processing architecture was elegant, class leading, and well ahead of its time.
Hi Andrew, Completely agree and it's a great shame that Inmos wasn't able to continue its development for longer. Who knows where it might have ended.
I was a Transputer user in the UK at one point so it's entirely possible I used a system that you helped design!
What a great blast from the past! I remember memorizing the t800 Inmos instruction set and the link between chips was amazing especially because you could load your bootstrap code over it. Years later I was surprised to find a t225 in a serial console server I picked up at auction. What a weird application for that chip!
Hi! Thanks so much for commenting. It's amazing where Transputers ended up being used. I love the 'bootstrap load' feature too. Can you still remember the ISA?
I don't .. it was a long time ago but I still have 'the transputer book' somewhere..
I later moved on to the i860 vector processor and *again* the transputer showed up on a hybrid system .. the only reference I can find is a paid for article
Personal supercomputing by using transputer and Intel 80860 in plasma
engineering | SpringerLink
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf00370011
Well, there it is ..
Caplin Cybernetics i860/Transputer cards
https://www.geekdot.com/caplin-cybernetics/
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