🚀 go-pugleaf

Just in case no one has noticed, Intel recently introduced a new processor
called the i-860.  Since then, many companies have announced that they will
bring i-860 based systems to market.  Some traditional 'Transputer companies'
are included in the list and so tales of mass abandonment of the Transputer has
spread through the rumour mills.  The main reason given for the leaving of the
Transputer is usually reported as performance of the processor.  It is time to
wake up and realize that it is not the processor performance that matters, but
the company selling it.  The purpose of this diatribe is to try to shake loose
some people both inside Inmos and outside to help pressure Inmos to actively
fight for their market.

Anyone who is only involved in research and thinks that the commercial
realities do not apply to them, consider this:  If the Transputer does not sell
well, it will be construed as a failure of the technology, not the marketing.
You will find it very difficult to get Industrial/Government research funding
for something which is a proven failure in the market.

Before going into this in much more depth I will let you know my bias.  I have
been working with, or trying to work with, the Transputer and occam since 1984.
In my opinion the Transputer is  elegant and probably the best design for large
parallel processing systems.  Many companies have proven this, not only though
Transputer based machines, but the Ncube, Intel iPSC and Amatek hypercubes.
The occam language is elegant and powerful.  I currently teach a Macintosh
version of Peter Welch's Occam and Transputer course here in the United States.
The response to occam has been very favorable and the attendees are generally
impressed with power of the language and how it makes them think about their
problems.  I am pro occam and Transputer in my bias.  

MYTH: "Everybody is designing in the i-860 over the Transputer since it is a
better mousetrap and gives them performance for their money."
FACT: In a graphics application, which Intel claims the i-860 is designed for,
a single i-860 performed about the same as 4 T800-20 processors with 4 cycle
RAM.  The retail price of the hardware is the same and the i-860 is NOT
expandable.
NOTE: Unlike early users of the T-800 who said with glee that it was all Inmos
claimed and more, people who have used the i-860, or built systems
incorporating the chip have found it is not 50 times faster, or 10 times
faster, depending on your measurement, but only about 4-6 times faster than a
Transputer.
CONCLUSION: People are designing in the i-860 for reasons other than pure
performance.  What is it?

To find out we must look at the companies involved (Inmos and Intel) and try to
find their similarities and differences.  Some of these differences are based
on the Thorne-EMI or publicly owned Inmos (old Inmos) some are observations
about the Thomson-owned Inmos (new Inmos).

1. They both claim to be semiconductor manufacturers specializing in advanced
CMOS technology.

2. They both believe there is a market in the high-end workstation or personal
computer market and that replicated micro-computer processors is a viable
direction for supercomputers to go.

3. They both use Regis-McKenna for their Public Relations.  RM is one of the
top firms in the field, responsible for Intel, Apple and other successful
company's PR.  Intel follows their advice, Inmos seems not to.

4. Product Roll-out.  When Intel introduced the i-860 it very carefully
targeted its audience and specified its target markets.  Yes, it did fumble a
little by first calling the i-860 a coprocessor, but this is mostly forgotten.
If anyone has seen the videotape of the roll-out of the i-860 or read the
marketing propaganda, you may have noticed that the wording describing the
processor was carefully chosen.  The language was chosen to target the
Transputer in many markets.  Inmos should be pleased that Intel thought
Transputer worthy enough for this attack.  Inmos should be worried and fight
back.  Intel seems to have contacted many of the Transputer developers to try
to get them to develop with the i-860 and they have learned from Inmos'
mistakes.

Intel and Inmos are sold through the same distributors so all it needed to do
was let the distributors' sales reps know about the i-860 and ask 'Are any of
your present customers potential developers'  The sales reps would immediately
think of anyone who is developing for the Transputer.  Nothing as subversive as
stealing a customer list is involved.

To have a number of third-party products working at the roll-out Intel provided
detailed specifications of the product to developers ahead of time.  I have
heard from reputable sources that Motorola distributed documents describing the
68040 architecture, instruction set, and preliminary interface timing a year
ago.  Six months ago they supposedly had preliminary pinout documents
available.  The 68040 is not even sampling until early next year, and then only
to select developers.

The T801-30, and T805-30 are supposed to be in fabrication now, according to
Inmos, and yet all that I have heard about the timing is that some of the setup
times are the same while other signals are 50% shorter than the T800-20.  At a
proper rollout of the 30Mhz parts Inmos should be able to point to a list of
third-party hardware and software developers and say 'You can buy it from them
now.'

The design of the T810 was frozen before the OUG meeting last March and is
promised for 1990.  The chip will have very different timing, different
instructions, and require different code optimizing schemes from the current
generation of Transputers.  Inmos should be planning a rollout in 1990 as a
media event presenting a consumer product chip.  What I mean by this is the
media should be impressed by the number of third party hardware products and
sophisticated software development environments as well as applications
available at product introduction.  The public should get from the introduction
the impression that not only is a single T810 similar in performance to the
i860, but that from day one there are numerous products supporting it, a dozen
hardware developers SHIPPING boards, 10 C compilers, 5 or 6 development
platforms and 50 application packages.  To do this Inmos has to start working
with the developers today.  If not the chip will be passed off as a technical
curiosity and not really a serious contender.

5. Software support.  In the beginning there was Inmos and occam.  When enough
noise was made, C was developed and Inmos licensed it, selling it as 'Inmos C'.
Since then about a dozen different C compilers have been developed.  Inmos now
develops a new C, rumored to be their own to compete with all the other C
compilers.  Five different operating systems or environments of note have
developed, Helios, Express, Trollius, Idris and Linda, so Inmos is now talking
about yet another.

Intel, on the other hand, contracted with two well-known compiler companies,
Greenhills and I think Whitesmiths, to develop compilers as the chip was
developed.  On announcement of the part, beta versions of the compilers were
shipping, one for UNIX and one for DOS.  A similar tact was taken for the
Fortran compiler.  If you want a C compiler, Intel will sell you the selected
one for your operating system environment at list price, or you can talk to the
developer - what Intel actually prefers.  If you want the tools on another
platform, Intel will port it for you, for less than what you would have to pay
Inmos for the privilege of going through the pain yourself.

I personally do not like C.  I also have heard from customers that they would
write in occam IF it would run on other processor and operating system
combinations.  Portability and longevity of the code is far more important than
elegance, that is why Fortran is still around. (Personally I prefer Fortran to
C for many applications, if only the compilers were better...)

6. Development System.  Intel requires you to use their 386 based UNIX
workstation for development until the compilers have stabilized.   This is just
to make debugging of the tools easier since UNIX is not portable.  After that,
Intel will not be in the development system/emulator market at all.  They are
working with some third-party manufacturers to provide development systems and
emulators for the i-860.  In the past Intel did make development systems, but
now they only make the system for the i-860 and can be believed when they say
it is only temporary.  

Inmos claims it is only a chip manufacturer and yet prices its development
systems to compete with its developers.  Inmos recently introduced lower
pricing and new Transputer modules to compete directly with third party
companies.  In addition they have sold to Universities at 50% off their list
price knowing full well they were bidding against both their own distributors
and third party developers.  This is worse in the new Inmos.

7. Evaluation units.  Intel knows that to get parts designed in it must provide
a few free samples.  NCR knows this, TRW knows this, Motorola, Hitachi,
Toshiba, AMD, National Semiconductor all know this, Inmos does not.  In the
past Inmos could claim poverty, or an owner that did not understand
semiconductors, although I would have thought that a record company would
understand free samples.  They are now owned by a large semiconductor
manufacturer and have bragged that they have a 4 million dollar marketing
budget and cannot think how they will spend it.  It is still impossible to get
samples.

8. Comarketing.  Everybody does it.  This can range from showing third party
products in your advertisements and having third party companies in your booth
at trade shows to cooperative advertising money based on sales.  After two
years of being told this was a good idea by Regis-McKenna, Inmos finally
invited companies into their booth at Siggraph last year.  Usually the space is
free, since having developers showing products reflects on the quality of your
product and is a symbiotic advertising event.  The third party provides
product, bodies, press releases and draws people to the booth, the host
provides booth space and coordinates publicity.  All companies do this whether
they are a multi-billion dollar Apple or Intel or merely a small startup.  It
is expected.  Inmos charged $5000 for the service, four times the rate for the
floor space, and did not list the companies' products in the show catalogue.
To be fair, they did not list their own, either.  

Intel provides all the traditional comarketing arangements.  They have in the
past, they know it works, and they will in the future.

If we summarize the differences in what the companies do, not their products we
have:

                               INTEL     INMOS
Actively pursue developers      YES        NO
Co-develop 3rd party software   YES        NO
Evaluation units                YES        NO
Compete with 3rd party 
   development software          NO       YES
Compete with 3rd part
   development hardware          NO       YES
Provide tools to port to
  other platforms               YES        NO
Co marketing                    YES        NO

If this is what you saw, who would you develop for?

Inmos may claim that this is all changing under Thomson, but it has not yet
changed visibly for the better, only for the worse.  In the short term Inmos
may realize better profits by competing with its customers, but in the end it
will chase them all off to use another chip and be left with no developers and
that will hurt everybody wanting to use Transputers and occam.

Intel realizes it needs developers and is actively working with them.  IBM's
PS-2 floundered without third party developers, even though it has an annual
R&D budget which is about twice as large as the lifetime sales of Inmos, or
twice the current sales of Thomson, and can theoretically develop anything that
is needed.   If  even IBM cannot sell a product without third party developers,
why should Inmos think it can?

Craig Davidson