Talk:Transputer

ST20
It's not strictly true to say that the ST20 is no longer built - the cores (c1 and c2) are still being used in devices, like the STi5514, STi5517 etc. They are due to be replaced in new chips, but the old ones will continue being made for quite some time yet. :)

arafel2 10:40 30 Jun 2004 (GMT)

The ST20 was actually a complete redesign. Started in June 1992 and with first silicon in 1994 it combined a lot of features from the T4 series and T9000 transputers. Interrupts and a debug controller were added specifically to support SOC systems and traps and other instructions were added to support operating systems. Two main versions were made. The C4 core was a superscalar design with a Tomosulu style architecture (see patent US5745725 for details) but turned out to be too big for the SOC market at the time. A cut down version (C2) was made shortly after and a minimal form of the T9 instruction grouping technology was added to get back some of the performance.

The word "Transputer"
message I left on User talk:220.130.0.100: Are you sure that Transputer stands for transmitter computer, not transistor computer? I could only find 2 pages on Google supporting that, one Polish and one Hungarian.. all the English pages say transistor computer. &mdash;Stormie 06:29, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)

Transputer was definitely a combination of 'transitor' and 'computer'. The idea was that the transputer would be sold in a cheap package with just power and link connections and would cost $5. Then you could have a board full of transputers instead of a board full of transistors.

--Robert.Simpson 09:32, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I worked in an experimental project at NASA Johnson Space Center in the early days of the Transputer. My recollection was that it was from Transister and Computer, with the idea that computers would be use like transistors. Unfortunately, I no longer have any written documentation. The article in its current form matches my recall to the extent I can recall details. I left the project in 1988 and later heard from former coworkers that the project moved from working models to all simulation.

192.30.100.251 (talk) 22:26, 18 February 2014 (UTC)Dennis Taylor dennist1 at tampabay dot RR dot com.

Ownership of Inmos
The article states "This was too much for INMOS, who didn't have the funding needed to continue development. The company was sold ....".

As I remember press reports at the time, INMOS Limited was owned (wholly? mostly?) by the UK Government, (possibly through the National Enterprise Board?) so it was not the people at Inmos who sold the company.

Songwriter 17:55 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Inmos was sold by the government to Thorn EMI in 1984. Having bought it, they didn't really know what to do with the company but kept it going with just enough investment. They sold it to SGS-Thomson (later STMicroelectronics) in around 1989. ST were quite supportive of the T9 development but their focus was on the high volume consumers market, not high end so the T9 was the end of the 'real' transputer development.

Move this page?
According to the first sentence the all-lowercase "transputer" was the official written form. Shouldn't we therefore move the page to INMOS transputer instead of it being at INMOS Transputer? -- stillnotelf   has a talk page  05:10, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Request: style correction
In section "Comparison with modern technology" two sentences in a row begin with "Nevertheless", and it looks awkward. Since I'm not a native English speaker, I don't think I'm qualified to tinker with that, so it would be nice if a native speaker takes a look at it and change one "nevertheless" to something else if necessary. --Arny 04:06, 14 February 2006 (UTC)


 * The first "nevertheless" made no sense in context anyway, so it's gone now. -- stillnotelf   has a talk page  05:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Information and Question
Added something about speed up problems with transputers. Question: HOWTO include T800 block diagram. Have I made an error uploading to wiki commons ? w:de:Benutzer:Lehrig Lehrig 05:23, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Clock multiplication
The article correctly states that the external clock was multiplied up (inside the chip). My recollection is that this was a pioneering idea later used on other processors (e.g. the Intel series including the Pentium) to overcome the problem of having a high-speed clock on a circuit board. Today's multi-GHz clock rates would not be possible without this technique. If I am correct it would be good for the article to include discussion of this historic point.Sangwine 11:13, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Stack Caching
The article states in a couple of places that the register stack cached the in-memory stack. This may or may not be technically correct, depending on what you mean by caching. On modern CPUs caching means that access to recently accessed memory locations is speeded up transparently to the machine code. This is not the case on the transputers - you must explicitly load values from the memory stack onto the register stack, and explicitly save values from the register stack onto the memory stack. It is true that the register stack was volatile - you didn't know what was on it after certain instructions had finished, and had to reload from the memory stack; in that sense the register stack is a cache. I think this point needs to be clarified in the article in prder to avoid confusing readers not familiar with transputer assembly language. --70.18.247.112 19:28, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

The article states (as of 19th March 2007) "For additional speed the T9000 cached the top 32 locations on the stack, instead of three as in earlier versions." This is wrong; the three deep register stack does not cache memory. The T9000 had a cache which could hold the first few (32???? - I need to check the documentation) locations of the workspace. This was implemented as registers and was fundamental to the way in which the T9000 worked. Roger 21:21, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Alice
We could maybe add some reference to the Alice Graph Reduction machine from Imperial College, London, which was a LISP supercomputer that could evaluate multiple parts of the graph in parallel. It represents all that was wonderful and tragic about the transputer. On the one hand, it could do fancy stuff in parallel. On the other, by the time it was finished, Sun workstations could outrun it. Some references to Alice-related publications come up on the web, but mostly to documents behind the ACM paywall.

Transputers for computer graphics
In the late 1980s, a company called "YARC" produced T800-based co-processor boards for PCs. Each board had 4 T800s with 4 megs of RAM per transputer, and the system had a secondary bus to link the cards together, allowing up to a 16 transputer network. I used a few of these systems with a software called "Digital Arts", which was an implementation of Pixar's Renderman. A scene to be rendered would be chopped up into 32 x 32 pixel "buckets" and the geometry, lighting and textures needed for each would be sent to a transputer, which would send the rendered pixels back to the framebuffer. K8 fan 01:17, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

The term "Transputer"
As noted above the term "transputer" was meant to refer to the processor as a transistor like system component of a computer. It was also the intention that the term transputer not be a trademark belonging to INMOS but a public domain term for this purpose. It did in fact find its way into dictionaries with this definition as I recall. --Steven Zenith 21:56, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Commercial Failure
It should be noted that the transputer was not a commercial failure, and my edit reflects this. The transputer certainly did not take over the world of computing in the way it was expected to at the end of the 1980s - but commercial failure? Far from it. Rather than being thrust into the mass-market limelight, taking over the world of server and high-performance computing as well as dominating developments in systems control, industrial and personal robotics, the transputer instead found itself forming the backbone of certain embedded product ranges from its ultimate commercial purchaser, ST Microelectronics.

"Commercial Failures" are unavoidably subjective. If you were expecting a $10bn company to emerge, anything less would be considered a commercial failure. If you were expecting a cool toy for hobbyists and academics to play with, an eventual $200m sale would have seemed like a resounding success.

It seems a full history given by those involved is missing from this article. --JonathanMayUK (talk) 15:04, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Atari wasn't the only one.
Atari seems to have only had a single workstation that was designed around this idea. I remember (and documented in the link following) that there were quite a few transputer boards that were designed to be dropped into any Amiga home computer. See http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/prototypes/transputer.html  This link even talks about an Amiga transputer that became the Atari one.

Is that worth mentioning since it seemed like a move to bring transputers into the mainstream?

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Another commercial use
The T425 was extensively used by broadcast equipment company Quantel, where I worked. It was used on a CPU per board basis, with CPU programmes in C++ and using the links for inter-board communications. The largest system, Clipbox, if stretched to its limit, which it never was, would have had over 100 transputers in ot.

Particularly of note was the Dylan 20 disk RAID, run by a single transputer, but ganged 4 wide using links for coordinated control.

Since I programmed these systems I don’t think I should be the one to put it on the page. But if anybody else feels it appropriate, please contact me, alec@aleccawley.com

Quantel also tried to use the T9000, but were defeated by the fact that the float to integer convert instruction was faulty, and the soft implementation was so slow it removed all the advantages of the T9000.

Alec (talk) 19:06, 13 June 2020 (UTC) Alec Cawley alec@aleccawley.com

"PREQUAL" is not really important
This stamp on top of the IC probably means that the device was an engineering sample and not production qualified. It really doesn't mean anything important, in the context of this web page.

Big in Japan?
I wonder if this article could add a link to the wiki article on the japanese national research initiative for "5th generation computing"? After all, both of those mid-late 1980s projects, the transputers and the japanese 5th gen. effort, concerned a vision of massive parallelism as the future of computing (and both of them failed, possibly for the same or similar reasons). 94.21.237.24 (talk) 12:35, 6 April 2021 (UTC)