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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

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 https://www.xmos.ai

yvdriess 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
zozbot234 4y ago
Modern multi-core computers all use an interconnect/network-on-a-chip to communicate across cores. Shared memory multiprocessing is built on top of that networked architecture, using cache coherence protocols. They also commonly use SMT which gives you the "virtual/logical cores", better known as hardware threads (harts).
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > Modern multi-core computers all use an interconnect/network-on-a-chip to communicate across cores These are nothing at all like the links that Transputers use to communicate internally.

yvdriess 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

zozbot234 4y ago

Modern multi-core computers all use an interconnect/network-on-a-chip to communicate across cores. Shared memory multiprocessing is built on top of that networked architecture, using cache coherence protocols. They also commonly use SMT which gives you the "virtual/logical cores", better known as hardware threads (harts).

jacquesm 4y ago
> Modern multi-core computers all use an interconnect/network-on-a-chip to communicate across cores These are nothing at all like the links that Transputers use to communicate internally.