🚀 go-pugleaf

The currrent issue of Personal Computer World (the nearest thing the UK
to Byte) contains more info on the Atari/Perihelion Transputer development.
Apparently, Atari actually arranged for Guy Kewney to meet with Perihelion !

Briefly, a Transputer is a 32 bit microprocessor designed by the UK
company, Inmos. It has two especially important features:

      - it uses a reduced (fast) instruction set (RISC technology)

      - it was designed to easily interwork, in parallel, with other
        Transputers

The T800 version of the Transputer also contains a floating point
processor (I believe, working in parallel with the main processor) and
4 Kbytes of very fast on chip memory.

There is an "official" contract between Atari and Perihelion, no details of
this are forthcoming but the gist of it is that Atari has the rights to the
machine and Perihelion retain rights to the Helios operating system. Atari
will then license Helios from Perihelion.

The machine is to be provided as an upgrade to the ST and as a stand-alone
box about the size of a Mega-ST. The PCW coverage is claiming the single
Transputer machine will be 10 times as powerful as an IBM AT (more if
measuring floating point operations).

"The key aim will be to make genuine animation possible at very high
resolution" (Whatever that means !).

The system will support probably the most important feature of the
Transputer, that is you will be able to add additional Transputers
either as a LAN of Atari Transputer systems, or as a multi-processor
machine.

The PCW writer expects "1 Mbyte of screen memory driven by a bit
blitter, and 4 Mbytes of system memory, upgradeable to 64 Mbytes" (he
infers that this capacity will be supported in the system box !)

Finally, he reports that Atari are planning to run a seminar (where ?)
towards the end of the year explaining in detail what the machine will do
and how to exploit it.

As to the aim of pricing this machine at around 1000 pounds ($1600),
another article I have seen makes me believe that this might be possible
sometime in '88. A Transputer board (20MHz T800, 2Mbytes memory, Occam
compiler) is being introduced by a company called "Microway" in
September, price 1750 pounds. With the bulk-buying power of Atari,
who knows ?