It’s a transputer! With
#CPUs
reaching fast their limits in the 1980s,
#INMOS
was following the idea of parallel computing to increase performance.
#transputer
stems from transistor & computer, where computers would be up numbered as were transistors before to reach scale…
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#INMOS
was acquired by SGS-Thomson in 1986 and the pioneering idea of parallel computing via transputers were soon discontinued.
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@duke_cpu
It actually was rather successfull for embedded systems which needed fairly high amounts of computations. I've used a spectrum analyser with some of them.
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@2019Casandro
Thanks. I would also say that superscalar architectures (so more than one single instruction per CPU cycle) developed faster than anticipated and offered performance boosts… evolution has its dead ends sometimes…
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@duke_cpu
Here is one of my favourite IT artefacts, it's a wafer of Inmos T425 chips. It is rumoured that there was a production fault that resulted in a whole batch being chucked, working or not, it's still framed on my "nerd wall"
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@duke_cpu
In 1988 I had a T800 Transputer card with an amazing 2MB RAM in my 80386 PC. It could draw the Mandelbrot set (640x480x16 colors) in an amazing 2 hours!!!!!
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@duke_cpu
When I was 18, in the earliest 80s, I thought all computers will had a set of transputers.
What a pity.
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@duke_cpu
I had to play with one of these at work. It was inscrutable to get anything real done.
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@duke_cpu
I still have a bunch. In working Rohde & Schwarz spectrum analyzers, and in the few remaining Pixar Renderman cards for the IBM PC, which are in my attic.
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@duke_cpu
I remember the crest of the transputer wave. The descendants of this approach are perhaps the Connection Machine and the modern cluster architecture.
One of the things that we learned from all this is that concurrent programming and load balancing are really hard.
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@duke_cpu
@EvilMnkyzDsignz
They are really nice pictures! Do you think I could use of them to illustrate an Embedsys Weekly issue? I give proper attribution.
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