Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!ogccse!blake!uw-beaver!microsoft!w-colinp From: w-colinp@microsoft.UUCP (Colin Plumb) Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer Subject: Re: What makes Transputer interesting Message-ID: <22@microsoft.UUCP> Date: 17 Nov 88 02:37:23 GMT References: <1389@thumper.bellcore.com> Reply-To: w-colinp@microsoft.UUCP (Colin Plumb) Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA Lines: 45 Confusion: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA 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)