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The Transputer: A parallel future [video]
- spacedcowboy 3y agoAnd now living on in the XMOS[1] chips... [1] https://www.xmos.com https://www.xmos.com
- Rochus 3y agoInteresting. But I didn't find any hint about Occam or Transputers on this site, and as it seems only the first generation of their designs (which is no longer available) had "XMOS links". Or did I miss something?
- spacedcowboy 3y agoThe same people who designed the transputer founded Xmos. The high-speed links, determinism, etc are very reminiscent, even if it’s not Occam (though i recall doing some stuff on a meiko surface in parallel C)
- Rochus 3y agoBut "XMOS links" seem to have vanished from the last two design generations, i.e. seem only to have been present in the first, now obsolete generation, isn't it? It rather looks like a common shared memory architecture now (unless I misinterpreted things).
- spacedcowboy 3y agoI think you might have missed it. They all still have links. Open any data sheet and you'll see a pin-table. Any pin with XLxy{in,out} [x,y=numbers] is a link pin (amongst other duties, it's multiplexed). The presence of an 'xConnect' block in the chip diagram is a giveaway too - the chip uses links internally to talk between multiple cores on a single die. AFAIK, they all have xConnect blocks (for the external links and timing)
- Rochus 3y agoOk, I see, thanks. I just read the descriptions on their website, didn't see any data sheets yet. Do you happen to know why they went away from Occam?
- spacedcowboy 3y agoI mean I don't work there, I don't know what their corporate strategy is :) I would suspect it's just developer familiarity - they used to use a language they named 'XC', which was basically C with built-in keyword extensions (like "par" :). These days they've internalized it into a library [1] so it looks just like standard C, but you still have macros like PAR_JOBS... [1] https://www.xmos.com/documentation/XM-014363-PC-7/html/prog-guide/quick-start/c-programming-guide/index.html#lib-xcore-prog-guide https://www.xmos.com/documentation/XM-014363-PC-7/html/prog-...
- Rochus 3y agoInteresting, thanks for the link. It's a good question whether the CSP constructs should be part of the language or part of the library. If people don't like or know Occam, maybe Go (or TinyGo) would be an alternative.