Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SDSU.EDU!davidson From: davidson@SDSU.EDU (Craig Davidson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer Subject: Transputer vs. i860 Message-ID: <8907150609.AA01452@sdsu.edu> Date: 15 Jul 89 06:09:37 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 205 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