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Now that's a name I have not heard in a long time! I saw the Transputer at a trade show (Comdex, perhaps) circa 1986. I was very intrigued by it and the Occam

Now that's a name I have not heard in a long time! I saw the Transputer at a trade show (Comdex, perhaps) circa 1986. I was very intrigued by it and the Occam language. It disappeared from the public eye but I always wondered what happened to it.

adrian_b 3y ago
While the Transputer had very limited success, all modern server CPUs have inherited its method of structuring the interfaces of a CPU. At that time (around 1984), and also during the next quarter of a century, almost all CPUs had interfaces based on an universal bus, possibly shared with other processors in a multiprocessor system, like the Intel CPUs until as late as 2008. On the other hand the Transputer had interfaces partitioned into a fast communication link with other processors (like now the inter-socket links), a local memory interface (like now DDR5) and a local peripheral interface (like now PCIe). After the disappearance of Transputers, this system architecture has been revived in some late DEC Alpha CPUs, then AMD has launched Opteron in 2003, with the help of some members of the DEC Alpha team, and eventually, 6 years later, Intel has followed the AMD model with Nehalem. Now nobody makes server CPUs that do not have Transputer-like intefaces.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  Very interesting, thanks. Thinking Machines was much in the news back then and that idea of multiple relatively simple but highly interconnected CPUs was "in the air." I had gone to the trade show to look at computers for the research group where I was a student - physical science, not computer science. We ultimately bought something more conventional which was obsolete in about 18 months when DEC workstations started appearing. It wasn't until I was firmly midcareer that I realized our (actually my) limitations had to do with lack of imagination and not any intrinsic limitations of the PC/XT/AT machines of our time.
zoenolan 3y ago
Some of the work was reused in the ST20 for embedded applications.

adrian_b 3y ago

While the Transputer had very limited success, all modern server CPUs have inherited its method of structuring the interfaces of a CPU. At that time (around 1984), and also during the next quarter of a century, almost all CPUs had interfaces based on an universal bus, possibly shared with other processors in a multiprocessor system, like the Intel CPUs until as late as 2008. On the other hand the Transputer had interfaces partitioned into a fast communication link with other processors (like now the inter-socket links), a local memory interface (like now DDR5) and a local peripheral interface (like now PCIe). After the disappearance of Transputers, this system architecture has been revived in some late DEC Alpha CPUs, then AMD has launched Opteron in 2003, with the help of some members of the DEC Alpha team, and eventually, 6 years later, Intel has followed the AMD model with Nehalem. Now nobody makes server CPUs that do not have Transputer-like intefaces.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
Very interesting, thanks. Thinking Machines was much in the news back then and that idea of multiple relatively simple but highly interconnected CPUs was "in the air." I had gone to the trade show to look at computers for the research group where I was a student - physical science, not computer science. We ultimately bought something more conventional which was obsolete in about 18 months when DEC workstations started appearing. It wasn't until I was firmly midcareer that I realized our (actually my) limitations had to do with lack of imagination and not any intrinsic limitations of the PC/XT/AT machines of our time.

zoenolan 3y ago

Some of the work was reused in the ST20 for embedded applications.