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It's very hard. In the mid 1980s there was a CPU called a "Transputer" [1] made some of the people who moved to ARM. These CPUs could be connected together in
by RachelF 10y ago
It's very hard.
In the mid 1980s there was a CPU called a "Transputer" [1] made some of the people who moved to ARM. These CPUs could be connected together in huge networks and directly talk to each other.
The network of CPU's could auto-discover its topology, but coding for so many CPU's was difficult. Some specific algorithms scaled well with the number of CPUs, but most did not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
- hexane360 10y agoWow, that reminds me of this[1] game. Lots of tiny processors messaging between each other. I didn't realize there were actual implementations. [1]http://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/
- jacquesm 10y agoOccam did it quite nicely. I think the reason transputers didn't 'make it' is not because they were super hard to program (it was only a little bit harder than programming a regular computer), but because the price premium you paid for a transputer set-up was too high and x86 got faster very rapidly. This is right around the time when the first 386 machines were launched and in a very short time we went from 12-20 MHz 286 boxes (and some 68K machines for the lucky ones) to 33 MHz 386 machines with a ton of RAM. So the advantage that transputers had was eroded very quickly and I don't think INMOS was ready to match pace. Now that we've reached the end of the line for that kind of speed increase we are seeing a renewed interest in multi-cpu fabric architectures, of which the transputer was an instance.
- bluedino 10y ago>> x86 got faster very rapidly. Is ARM ( or something else) going to surpass x86 (amd64 whatever you want to call it) in the near future?
- digi_owl 10y agoJust a layman, but i get the impression as of late that things are running into thermal and feature size issues. And that these will affect all ISA equally.
- stcredzero 10y agoI think the reason transputers didn't 'make it' is not because they were super hard to program You could replace "transputers" with [insert-architecture] and wind up with a nice overarching theory to explain the history of computer hardware.
- gnufx 10y agoYes, but in the areas I saw at the time, transputers lost out in particular to i860 for floating point systems and to m68k for things like our mostly-integer "streaming map-reduce" -- it seems! -- system. (Being able to house 68ks in a blade system, i.e. VME/VXI crates, helped.)
- TickleSteve 10y agoI was involved with a system porting it from an old transputer based system to a PowerPC&C/C++ based one. Transputers never really scaled into this sort of league, they were more 8/16/32 type scenarios.. For the interested, there was also the Atari Transputer Workstation (ATW). ...Although interesting, they were expensive and didn't perform compared to the equivalent sequential machine. Given development tho, who knows where it could have gone.
- atrn 10y agotransputers had four links and comms beyond that required routing in s/w. I wrote such a thing for a transputer machine. Also, the auto-discovery wasn't really auto... That was the boot code probing for CPUs on other ends of links and propagating itself to connected CPUs, building a map of the network in the process (which is kind of cool).