14 ms·
Transputer
- TickleSteve 7y agoIf you're interested in transputers, you will likely find this interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation) The Atari Transputer Workstation was a technological oddball of which there were quite a few around that time. see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine The 80's were a wonderful time for computer hardware...
- fallous 7y agoAmusingly the Atari Transputer started out as an Amiga project but Commodore wasn't interested. http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/metacomco.htm http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/metacomco.htm
- kabdib 7y agoI was at Atari when, one fine day, some folks in the UK that we had never heard of did a product announcement about an Atari computer that definitely was not coming out of our engineering group. (We were down to one building at that point, if you don't count our remote office in Monterey as part of the GEM porting effort). I remember the Tramiels being a little flabbergasted by the Transputer announcement as well.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoWow, thanks for that tidbit of history. Always enjoy your Atari reminiscences.
- mdda 7y agoI was a summer intern at the UK company (Perihelion) doing the Atari-based Transputer machines. The word there was that because Atari had invested in the UK company (?) the Atari machine was essential to include as the front-end, even though it didn't really fit the UK designers' idea of what a good front-end machine would be... (nothing against the Atari design, just that its quirks/shortcuts didn't match up with the Transputer cluster backend 'vision').
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThere was a range of transputer addons and dedicated systems all the way up to the very pretty and very expensive Meiko Computing Surface[1] with something like 100 (300? honestly can't remember) transputers in it. It seemed, for a while, like they were being shoehorned into everything. There was a distinct belief that transputers were the way the future was going. I think the expectation was before too long everything would gain a set of transputers as replacement to a single one thread CPU, or in addition to, much like machines gained graphics cards. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiko_Scientific#Computing_Surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiko_Scientific#Computing_Sur... Seem to remember there was once a dedicated page with pictures, could be mistaken, but if there was it's been deleted. Such is Wikipedia "progress".
- UncleSlacky 7y agoI had an encounter with a Meiko Computing Surface (64 or 128 Transputers, I think?) around 1990, as I was studying Occam at the time. It was impressive to watch it rendering high-res 3D fractal landscapes in real time.
- linker3000 7y agoDitto a few years before that - we had a Meiko box in the visuals R&D dept of the flight simulator company where I was doing my electronic engineering apprenticeship, although I didn't really get hands-on with it.
- mpweiher 7y agoYep, a very interesting machine, and interesting time. I still have the Helios reference manuals (OS for the ATW). Now that Intel can no longe snuff out competition by being one fab-generation ahead, we might have space for more interesting architectures.
- aap_ 7y agoI got to play with one a few months ago. cool thing!
- jacobush 7y agoI programmed it in university in one of our classes. The objective was to make a Mandelbrot renderer faster.
- sitkack 7y agoIf you are interested in Transputers you should purchase an XMOS dev kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMOS https://www.xmos.com/ https://www.xmos.com/ https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-programmers/evaluation-boards-embedded-mcu-dsp/786?FV=-8%7C786%2C-1%7C880&quantity=0&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-...
- Confiks 7y agoCould you be a bit more specific in how the two companies and / or products are related, apart from the nameplay? I noticed that the then chief architect of Inmos also co-founded XMOS. There seems to be a pretty active forum here: https://www.xcore.com https://www.xcore.com
- joshu 7y ago“ The name XMOS is a loose reference to Inmos. Some concepts found in XMOS technology (such as channels and threads) are part of the Transputer legacy.”
- sitkack 7y agoThey were both started by the same person, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientis... The XMOS processors share many of the same architectural properties as Transputers.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoI have an XMOS dev board sitting in a drawer basically unused since I found I had to use their proprietary extended C dialect. But I understand they may have fixed this since?
- peglasaurus 7y agoI don't know anything about that dialect. What were your experiences? Is your codebase uncompilable using their tools? Would a simple hello world compile? How foreign does a simple blinky program look to a C programmer?
- dang 7y agoRelated from 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898569 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7591285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7591285 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995277 2018 (a bit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18576037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18576037 Same Wikipedia page from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16190102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16190102
- tiborsaas 7y agoSo we can expect a new appearance on the front page in 2022 :)
- davidw 7y ago> While Inmos and the transputer did not achieve this expectation, the transputer architecture was highly influential in provoking new ideas in computer architecture, several of which have re-emerged in different forms in modern systems. I have a vague sense that there's a rich vein of potential projects and maybe businesses in "before their time" ideas in the world of computing.
- creddit 7y agoIf you want inspiration the Computer Chronicles was a show on PBS documenting in real time the process and rise of computers. I believe all episodes are on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT
- jdblair 7y agoWith co-host Gary Kildall, of CP/M and Digital Research fame!
- K0SM0S 7y agoThis is incredible. I think I've just found my new late-night / fall-asleep 'fictional' TV show — because it really feels that way, in our weird cognitive perception of the past. Thanks a lot for the pointer. This may spark funny and uncanny world-domination ideas! ( : A serious hint/note for the "futurologists" / innovation-driven folks out there — my people: look for what was true back then but is no longer, especially in the form of limitations or roadblocks or axiom (hard limit) to a design. Remove that piece and see what you get...
- sifar 7y agoCouldn't agree more. A lot of things were invented in the 60's-80's which didn't work out due to lack of applications, technological limitations of those times etc.
- dboreham 7y agoA partial list: USB On-chip PLL clock generator Automatic power on reset On-chip programmable DRAM controller Hardware threading On-chip I/O DMA Concurrency and parallelism in programming languages
- samsquire 7y agoThe concurrent programming language occam that ran on the transputer can still be ran today with occam pi. https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/kroc/ https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/kroc/
- sitkack 7y agoI look forward to running KRoC on Wasm, the http://www.transterpreter.org/ http://www.transterpreter.org/ is an inspiration.
- UncleSlacky 7y agoNice to see that there's still Transputer work going on at Kent - I studied Occam briefly there in the late 80s/early 90s and was allowed to look at (not touch!) their Meiko Computing Surface rendering fractal landscapes in real time.
- w0utert 7y agoI’ve always thought of the Zachtronics game TIS-100 [1] to resemble programming an extremely simple transputer. Definitely worthwhile to try the game, if only to find out about all new kinds of problems you run into if you have to distribute your processing over multiple independent nodes that communicate over serial links! [1] http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/ http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/
- bear8642 7y agoFeel it's more like Chuck Moore's GA144, but yes good game
- K0SM0S 7y agoQuestion to people who know anything about circuit, processor design: are we confident that current designs and paradigms are almost-as-good-as-it-gets for our classes of materials, or is it just the result of 'good enough design + scale economics = winner CPU arch' (resp. all types of processors) but there could be many great "unknown unknowns" out there?
- littlecranky67 7y agoCurrent CPUs are no where near "almost-as-good-as-it-gets" for the simple reason that compatibility with existing software (OS and Consumer Software wise) still is main driving force in CPU design. If you come up with something revolutionary, you have to convince hell-ofa-lot software engineers to port to your arch, because without software no one will buy your hardware.
- K0SM0S 7y agoI guess the choice thus comes down to how much potential benefits may be possible, versus what software actually needs? (I can see first-hand we don't need more single-thread performance in so many use cases) I just have no idea "how good it can get", compared to what we have now. Is there an alternative world where CPUs vastly outperform ours in performance/power using the same materials? But more importantly how much can "vastly" be?
- pjc50 7y agoSingle thread performance is still the limiting factor for things like perceived web browser performance. Raw MIPS is available in absurd amounts, but things like memory round trip delay become limiting. The lower energy limit is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle but we're a long way from that.
- K0SM0S 7y ago> memory round trip delay Is that where Zen's architecture, with memory controller central to the chip (close to memory IO up/down) and 'chiplets' containing cores left and right, makes so much sense? I'm partial to announcements of "3D" stacking chips; wherein memory cells, controller and CPU cores are arranged like cake layers, thus with extremely short memory round trips. A clever design could entirely remove the need for L3 cache I suppose, make RAM behave essentially as such. It's elegant I think, somewhat balanced in design, essential. And I find it crazy and awesome that cooling those is even possible.
- michaelhoffman 7y agoI remember seeing these advertised ubiquitously in computer magazines in the late 1980s. Was always a bit curious about them. This Wikipedia link 30 years later is the closest I ever came to interacting with one myself.
- jacquesm 7y agoTransputers were and are interesting, they are the closest to a dataflow or systolic array processor with enough power and forethought gone into their design that you could use them for real world applications. But the MHz wars killed all those effort and only now, that we've exhausted the easy gains does it make sense to review the past to see what we can salvage in terms of ideas.
- afiori 7y agoMy favorite one (that probably will never come back) is the concept of ternary computer on a balanced ternary number system. In hindsight it is a much better way to encode signs for both integers and floating points.
- DonaldFisk 7y agoThis was the Setun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun), developed at Moscow State University.
- Avi-D-coder 7y agoWhy is ternary better? I haven't heard this argued before?
- logfromblammo 7y agoMaximal information efficiency is achieved at "e-ary" (~2.718281828) distinct values per place, and this is closer to ternary than binary.
- jessriedel 7y agoOK, but the percentage increase in efficiency will be what? At the cost of completely overhauling all your low-level hardware?
- microcolonel 7y ago
- ourlordcaffeine 7y agoDavid May was my computer architecture professor.
- EdNutting 7y agoDavid May is my PhD supervisor and cofounder of our new microprocessor company - BeyondRISC. David's 3rd startup ;)
- rudolph9 7y agoI hypothesize what was really missing to make the transputer successful was a language/compile-target to express propagators: https://youtu.be/nY1BCv3xn24 https://youtu.be/nY1BCv3xn24 We are starting to see languages that could leverage such an architecture: * http://minikanren.org/ http://minikanren.org/ * https://cuelang.org/ https://cuelang.org/ * https://github.com/ekmett/guanxi https://github.com/ekmett/guanxi Is there an algebraic logic strongly associated with what we conventionally think of as types (see https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic/ https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic/) which we can effectively and efficiently compute unions and Boolean satisfiability?
- dboreham 7y agoThe thing that sunk the Transputer was that you couldn't (for the time it had a hardware performance advantage over competitors) program it in C.
- rudolph9 7y agoWhat did you program it in?
- fallous 7y agoOccam was the native INMOS provided programming language.
- pdfernhout 7y agoI programmed in Occam for a time. It used two spaces for indentationally-significant code which I thought a great idea then -- and which is one reason I liked Python and took easily to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language) For a time around 1986-1987 I had several Transputer boards in a robot lab I worked in at Princeton University. I liked the INMOS sale pitch that someday you could have a transputer at every robot joint. Something similar is relatively easily accomplished now using various serial connections between microcontrollers -- even if it might still be easier to just run cables to the joints from boards elsewhere. That combination of Transputer boards (including several loaner boards from another lab on campus which has got them related to NSA-funded signal processing stuff) for a time gave me the most powerful computer on the Princeton campus in terms of total memory and CPU cycles -- even if the IBM 308X mainframe in the computer center no doubt had more total I/O capacity. One other thing I liked about transputers was the (for the time) high speed serial links between them which could also go to special chips to read or write parallel data. I used such chips to interface a network of transputers to the teach pendant of an Hitachi A4 industrial robot so they could essentially press the buttons on the pendant to drive the robot around. Interesting how modern USB in a way is essentially just a serial transputer link. A PU undergrad student I helped used that setup for a project to use sensing whiskers to "feel" where objects were (inspired by a robotics magazine article I had seen by a group in Australia who had done that for a different robot). While transputers not supporting C was an issue early on, another issue was just that Occam did not easily support recursion. Transputer at the start also did not have standard libraries of code then like C had from Unix. And also transputers were expensive (as was the software development kit) and also they were not easy to get in the USA with various supply chain issues and delays. Occam was mind-expanding in its own way. I had previously networked a couple of Commodore VICs and a Commodore 64 for a robot project (via modems to an IBM mainframe) for my undergraduate senior project at Princeton a couple of years earlier using assembler, BASIC, and C -- so the transputers with Occam were a big step up from that conceptually. Still, practically I had gotten the Commodore equipment plus a parallel code simulator (a VM in C) I wrote for the IBM mainframe running under VMUTS to do more interesting stuff -- perhaps because I had years of experience programming in those other languages by then whereas Occam was so different and I did not spend that much time with it before leaving that job. Even without Occam and transputers, that robot lab job was the best paying job working for someone else I ever would have in many ways as far as autonomy, mastery, and purpose -- but I did not appreciate it then as it was my first real job beyond college and I figured the grass would be greener somewhere else -- not realizing that grass tends to be greener where you water it. Thanks for creating such a great working situation for me, Alain!
- duelingjello 7y agoRelated: four-phase logic[0] and its red-haired, CMOS step-child, domino logic[1]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-phase_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-phase_logic 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_logic
- burntcorn11 7y agoI assumed it was a new name for cars since there computers on wheels
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoIt sounds a liiitle bit like GreenArrays? http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/ Except with multiple chips, not many cores like GreenArrays. Similar ideas seem to pop up often and not really catch on too much.
- sansnomme 7y agoGreen Arrays suffer from the issue of low compute power. They target the extreme low power market using a proprietary Forth dialect. It is difficult to benchmark how it performs against existing general purpose ARM/x86-64/RISC-V or even NVIDIA chips other than their claims of efficiency gains due to a parallel architecture. Most of their existing press (especially on HN) is because their founder is the inventor of Forth and that everything is allegedly built on a single bootstrapped end-to-end Forth system with its own EDA toolkit. Would be interesting if somebody can do a rigorous test against e.g. Parallela chips.
- godelmachine 7y agoAre all current computers essentially transputer?
- madsohm 7y agoIf you're interested in more academic Transputers take a look at the CPA (Communicating Process Architectures) conferences [0]. Just last year it featured two papers on Transputers. [0] http://wotug.cs.unlv.edu/conference.php?id=46 http://wotug.cs.unlv.edu/conference.php?id=46
- EdNutting 7y agoOn the 40th anniversary of Inmos, creators of Transputer, we filmed this set of talks discussing the legacy and impact of Inmos in Bristol, UK. You'll find some fun insight into Inmos and the transputer in some of the longer talks. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKbvCgwMcH7A_taW2Td3RrH10dTfHw7Br&feature=share https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKbvCgwMcH7A_taW2Td3R...
- jbgreer 7y agoIn 1988 a friend and I presented at the 3rd Conference on Hypercubes and Concurrent Computers. We had spent the summer and fall programming an Intel Scientific Hypercube. Fractal calculations, heat diffusion, chemical reactions, that sort of thing. Used to take us 20 minutes a run. We’re on the vendor display floor walking around, talking to folks, watching demos. A guy has a board in an expansion board in his desktop computer. The cover is off and he’s pointing out the 2 transputer chips on it. Meanwhile the display screen is filling out a familiar drawing of a fractal. I ask how long it took them to render the drawing. “Oh, no, it’s doing that work now.” A cute little board readily outstripping our refrigerator sized machine back home. I ended up talking with David May. The thing he seemed most proud of at the moment was their floating point work. They had written a description of their new floating point unit in Occam. They had tested and debugged it. They had formally proved the implementation of a standard (IEEE 754?). And then they had built the silicon. I returned home with a set of inmos manuals. Never could get anyone back at uni to see the potential. Sigh. Still, at the moment I knew I was truly in the presence of the state of the art.
- blakespot 7y agoI so wanted an Atari ABAQ back in the late '80s.