3 ms·

Can someone who read this article post a sentence (like just a headline) of what the article is actually about, like what an inmo or transputer is, without star

by lucb1e 4y ago

Can someone who read this article post a sentence (like just a headline) of what the article is actually about, like what an inmo or transputer is, without starting with a background life story and life goals like the article?

meindnoch 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers
  - Qem 4y ago
    Sorta like Actor model, but in hardware?
    - atrn 4y ago
      CSP. In hardware.
      - Animats 4y ago
        Right. For pipeline hardware, the per-CPU resources have to be well matched to the problem. You have to cut up the problem into bite-size pieces that are the right size for the compute and memory of the little processors. Audio, yes; sonar, yes; cellular problems such as weather prediction and finite element analysis, maybe. The PS3/Cell ran into that problem, which is why later Playstations are more conventional. Exotic parallel architectures: you can build it, but will they come? Usually, no. You need some widely used case that partitions to match the hardware. GPUs and Bitcoin mining are the big successes so far. Machine learning has that property. Successes in this area tend to come from needing to solve a specific problem at scale.
      - abudabi123 4y ago
        Why not compose a 3, 6, 12 year business plan and approach Nvidia for a 20-49% stake in ownership? Show up at the HN Taipei meet-up and ask around? They had $40B plus to acquire ARM. What if the transputer concept can lower the W-budget for genuine-ai? Without leaving the UK you could ask around Man. U. there's an ARM lab there.
__d 4y ago
Inmos was a British semiconductor company which made a series of CPUs it called Transputers in the late 1980s-early 1990s. Transputers were novel in that they combined a CPU core with a set of high-speed network links: the CPU ran at, eg. 20MHz and the four network links at 20Mbps. Paired with this hardware was the programming language Occam, which was derived from the ideas of Tony Hoare's CSP, and included concurrency and communications primitives that mapped directly onto the Transputer hardware. The end result was a system in which it was easy to configure a parallel machine with a mesh, torus, or tree of CPUs that could then run CSP-style concurrent programs very effectively. While it saw some success in various niches (image and signal processing, for instance), the Transputer CPUs did not support other popular languages of the time (C, Pascal, Fortran, etc) well, and for various reasons, Inmos was unable to evolve the design to match the performance of (in particular) the Intel x86 family. From an initial position of having competitive performance and superior concurrency and communication, the Transputer was quickly left behind, and its successor (the T9000-series) was obsolete before launch.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Quick note that there were compilers for other languages. Definitely C. Probably Pascal. Not sure about Fortran. I think the failure to keep the single-CPU performance edge was probably mostly about lack of money vs the competitors. Obviously related to not selling enough of the first generation chips.
  - __d 4y ago
    There were: Rowley did Modula2, there was a GCC port, there was an Ada port, and various others, commercial and open source. But the Transputer architecture, which was stack-based, didn't lend itself to easy ports of most existing compilers, and they were slow to arrive and slow when they did. The article also discusses the reasons for the lack of follow-on investment.
  - gnufx 4y ago
    > Not sure about Fortran. There was -- used for scientific computing on things like the Meiko Computing Surface, though not by me.
greg7mdp 4y ago
Makes me remember how fun it was to read Byte in the 1980s! https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05/page/n219/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05/page/n219/...

by lucb1e 4y ago

meindnoch 4y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

lucb1e 4y ago
> a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers
- Qem 4y ago
  Sorta like Actor model, but in hardware?
  - atrn 4y ago
    CSP. In hardware.
    - Animats 4y ago
      Right. For pipeline hardware, the per-CPU resources have to be well matched to the problem. You have to cut up the problem into bite-size pieces that are the right size for the compute and memory of the little processors. Audio, yes; sonar, yes; cellular problems such as weather prediction and finite element analysis, maybe. The PS3/Cell ran into that problem, which is why later Playstations are more conventional. Exotic parallel architectures: you can build it, but will they come? Usually, no. You need some widely used case that partitions to match the hardware. GPUs and Bitcoin mining are the big successes so far. Machine learning has that property. Successes in this area tend to come from needing to solve a specific problem at scale.
    - abudabi123 4y ago
      Why not compose a 3, 6, 12 year business plan and approach Nvidia for a 20-49% stake in ownership? Show up at the HN Taipei meet-up and ask around? They had $40B plus to acquire ARM. What if the transputer concept can lower the W-budget for genuine-ai? Without leaving the UK you could ask around Man. U. there's an ARM lab there.

__d 4y ago

Inmos was a British semiconductor company which made a series of CPUs it called Transputers in the late 1980s-early 1990s. Transputers were novel in that they combined a CPU core with a set of high-speed network links: the CPU ran at, eg. 20MHz and the four network links at 20Mbps. Paired with this hardware was the programming language Occam, which was derived from the ideas of Tony Hoare's CSP, and included concurrency and communications primitives that mapped directly onto the Transputer hardware. The end result was a system in which it was easy to configure a parallel machine with a mesh, torus, or tree of CPUs that could then run CSP-style concurrent programs very effectively. While it saw some success in various niches (image and signal processing, for instance), the Transputer CPUs did not support other popular languages of the time (C, Pascal, Fortran, etc) well, and for various reasons, Inmos was unable to evolve the design to match the performance of (in particular) the Intel x86 family. From an initial position of having competitive performance and superior concurrency and communication, the Transputer was quickly left behind, and its successor (the T9000-series) was obsolete before launch.

dboreham 4y ago
Quick note that there were compilers for other languages. Definitely C. Probably Pascal. Not sure about Fortran. I think the failure to keep the single-CPU performance edge was probably mostly about lack of money vs the competitors. Obviously related to not selling enough of the first generation chips.
- __d 4y ago
  There were: Rowley did Modula2, there was a GCC port, there was an Ada port, and various others, commercial and open source. But the Transputer architecture, which was stack-based, didn't lend itself to easy ports of most existing compilers, and they were slow to arrive and slow when they did. The article also discusses the reasons for the lack of follow-on investment.
- gnufx 4y ago
  > Not sure about Fortran. There was -- used for scientific computing on things like the Meiko Computing Surface, though not by me.

greg7mdp 4y ago

Makes me remember how fun it was to read Byte in the 1980s! https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05/page/n219/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05/page/n219/...