Talk:Transputer

message: message I left on User talk:220.130.0.100: Are you sure that Transputer stands for transmitter computer, not transistor computer? I could only find 2 pages on Google supporting that, one Polish and one Hungarian.. all the English pages say transistor computer. —Stormie 06:29, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)
Transputer was definitely a combination of 'transitor' and 'computer'. The idea was that the transputer would be sold in a cheap package with just power and link connections and would cost $5. Then you could have a board full of transputers instead of a board full of transistors.
--Robert.Simpson 09:32, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The word "Transputer"

message: According to the first sentence the all-lowercase "transputer" was the official written form.  Shouldn't we therefore move the page to INMOS transputer instead of it being at INMOS Transputer? -- stillnotelf has a talk page 05:10, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move this page? 

message: In section "Comparison with modern technology" two sentences in a row begin with "Nevertheless", and it looks awkward. Since I'm not a native English speaker, I don't think I'm qualified to tinker with that, so it would be nice if a native speaker takes a look at it and change one "nevertheless" to something else if necessary. --Arny 04:06, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The first "nevertheless" made no sense in context anyway, so it's gone now. -- stillnotelf has a talk page 05:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request: style correction 

message: Added something about speed up problems with transputers.
Question: HOWTO include T800 block diagram. Have I made an error uploading to wiki commons ?
w:de:Benutzer:Lehrig Lehrig 05:23, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Information and Question 

message: The article correctly states that the external clock was multiplied up (inside the chip). My recollection
is that this was a pioneering idea later used on other processors (e.g. the Intel series including the
Pentium) to overcome the problem of having a high-speed clock on a circuit board. Today's multi-GHz clock
rates would not be possible without this technique. If I am correct it would be good for the article to
include discussion of this historic point.Sangwine 11:13, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clock multiplication 

message: The article states in a couple of places that the register stack cached the in-memory stack. This may or may not be technically correct, depending on what you mean by caching. On modern CPUs caching means that access to recently accessed memory locations is speeded up transparently to the machine code. This is not the case on the transputers - you must explicitly load values from the memory stack onto the register stack, and explicitly save values from the register stack onto the memory stack. It is true that the register stack was volatile - you didn't know what was on it after certain instructions had finished, and had to reload from the memory stack; in that sense the register stack is a cache. I think this point needs to be clarified in the article in prder to avoid confusing readers not familiar with transputer assembly language. --70.18.247.112 19:28, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stack Caching 

message: In the late 1980s, a company called "YARC" produced T800-based co-processor boards for PCs. Each board had 4 T800s with 4 megs of RAM per transputer, and the system had a secondary bus to link the cards together, allowing up to a 16 transputer network. I used a few of these systems with a software called "Digital Arts", which was an implementation of Pixar's Renderman. A scene to be rendered would be chopped up into 32 x 32 pixel "buckets" and the geometry, lighting and textures needed for each would be sent to a transputer, which would send the rendered pixels back to the framebuffer. K8 fan 01:17, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Transputers for computer graphics 

message: As noted above the term "transputer" was meant to refer to the processor as a transistor like system component of a computer. It was also the intention that the term transputer not be a trademark belonging to INMOS but a public domain term for this purpose. It did in fact find its way into dictionaries with this definition as I recall.
--Steven Zenith 21:56, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The term "Transputer"  

message: It should be noted that the transputer was not a commercial failure, and my edit reflects this. The transputer certainly did not take over the world of computing in the way it was expected to at the end of the 1980s - but commercial failure? Far from it. Rather than being thrust into the mass-market limelight, taking over the world of server and high-performance computing as well as dominating developments in systems control, industrial and personal robotics, the transputer instead found itself forming the backbone of certain embedded product ranges from its ultimate commercial purchaser, ST Microelectronics.
"Commercial Failures" are unavoidably subjective. If you were expecting a $10bn company to emerge, anything less would be considered a commercial failure. If you were expecting a cool toy for hobbyists and academics to play with, an eventual $200m sale would have seemed like a resounding success.
It seems a full history given by those involved is missing from this article. --JonathanMayUK (talk) 15:04, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Commercial Failure 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The T425 was extensively used by broadcast equipment company Quantel, where I worked. It was used on a CPU per board basis, with CPU programmes in C++ and using the links for inter-board communications. The largest system, Clipbox, if stretched to its limit, which it never was, would have had over 100 transputers in ot.
Particularly of note was the Dylan 20 disk RAID, run by a single transputer, but ganged 4 wide using links for coordinated control. 
Since I programmed these systems I don’t think I should be the one to put it on the page. But if anybody else feels it appropriate, please contact me, alec@aleccawley.com
Quantel also tried to use the T9000, but were defeated by the fact that the float to integer convert instruction was faulty, and the soft implementation was so slow it removed all the advantages of the T9000.
Alec (talk) 19:06, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another commercial use 

message: I wonder if this article could add a link to the wiki article on the japanese national research initiative for "5th generation computing"? After all, both of those mid-late 1980s projects, the transputers and the japanese 5th gen. effort, concerned a vision of massive parallelism as the future of computing (and both of them failed, possibly for the same or similar reasons). 94.21.237.24 (talk) 12:35, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Big in Japan?