Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!ames!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!hankd From: hankd@pur-ee.UUCP (Hank Dietz) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Transputer based systems. Summary: Transputers going nowhere general-purpose Message-ID: <9248@pur-ee.UUCP> Date: 22 Sep 88 22:13:25 GMT References: <253@uceng.UC.EDU> <3011@hubcap.UUCP> <69514@sun.uucp> Distribution: na Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network Lines: 30 David Emberson's comments sum it up nicely, however, as someone who has seen much of the updated Transputer stuff, I feel obliged to add a few quick comments: The newer Occam isn't compatible with the old one... and the compiler still lives in its own little world, which isn't very pleasant if you are used to something else (like a unix environment and editors like emacs). Inmos and the Transputer-using world are still encouraging Occam as THE language, with other languages compiling into it (I don't know if that's what the C compiler does... I've never managed to find a copy of it). As for code quality, well, I've seen no indication that Occam is doing anything particularly interesting or clever (I'm an optimizing/parallelizing compiler person :-). As before, an occam program is not a complete program unless accompanied by a description of the physical connection pattern; routing isn't point-to-point, but rather physical-neighbor point-to-point. There is no standard way to alter the physical connection pattern. I've talked with a few folks from Inmos about us (Purdue EE) doing a software-implemented (interrupt driven) shared-memory environment managed by compiler-driven cache techniques, and they sound interested, but they have yet to really move on it. I've gotten the same response David got: they claim that Occam and the connection scheme are basically features to build upon, not handicaps to overcome. There are LOTS of companies making little (4-16 processor) Transputer stick-it-in-there or hang-it-off-that type products, but I don't know of any general-purpose machine claiming to use Transputers without a host system which uses another processor. -hankd