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