🚀 go-pugleaf

First of all, I agree that it's the level of integration that makes
a transputer interesting.  They can do useful work with no external
components - just feed it power, ground, clock, reset line, and
hook up a link or two.  You can boot it, download programs, and run
them.

In article <1389@thumper.bellcore.com> rtm1@thumper.UUCP (Ravi Masand) writes:
>Also provided in hardware is a floating point unit. As to how it compares with
>the 80387 and Motorola's FPU I don't know. Reasonably well I'd suspect. 

It blows them away.  Against good FP ALUs (MIPS, Am29027, BIT's
stuff) it's not great, but it's at least in Weitek's league.
We've timed 2 MFLOPS doing dot products in on-chip RAM.

>Far as the software is concerned - Inmos claims that a high percentage (~70?)
>of the instructions can be coded in one byte. I have looked at the instruction
>encoding philosophy and found it to be impressive. If you are at all interested
>in CPU architectures you really should look at it. It is, to say the very
>least, 'Interesting'.

Well, they have got a patent on it.  I think it's closer to 50%, but still
the code is highly compact.  (There are a few rearrangements I'd like to make,
but that's another story.)  Having programmed it in assembler a fair bit,
I'll avoid "impressive" and stick to "interesting".  There are things they
could have done better.  (Have cj pop the 0?  Unsigned gt?)

>Questions: Has anyone out there worked with the transputer in  a language other
>than Occam ? How has it worked out ? Is Occam really mandatory to use the
>CPU to its fullest ? And anyone know of a good book/reference to pick up
>Occam in a hurry ??

Well, several C compilers are available.  I reccomennd Logical Systems' C
compiler, $6xx.xx with full source last time I looked.  Kirk, are you
still out there to correct me?  They're based in Corvallis, Oregon.  We had
a couple of problems writing our OS in it, but it can handle serious work.

I haven't done any work in Occam, but C works fine.  No, Occam isn't mandatory,
although it makes communications-rich code a bit more legible.  Kirk's
compiler has #pragma asm and #pragma endasm so you can escape to assembler
and get at anything the machine provides.

It's fun to play around with.  I enjoy watching Mandelbrot sets running on
28 processors.
-- 
	-Colin (microsof!w-colinp@sun.com)