v089pfrb@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu (Jeffrey C Murphy) (01/24/91)
In article <1907@gold.gvg.tek.com>, brandonl@gold.gvg.tek.com (Brandon Lovested) writes... [delete...snip...del..cut..] >I need to know what's the name of the company, or how I can learn more >about this transputer board. [del...snip...cut....cut.] I asked about the transputer a while back. Here's everything I found out: Company(s): INMOS (England) Solid State Leisure (u.k.) Sang (Germany) I have not personally confirmed any of these... (see note at end) The transputer is a multiprocessor board which works as a parallel processing unit. The chips that have been mentioned to me are the 212 and 414 series transputer. It is a high speed cpu w/an fpa (floating point accel) some ram (varing amounts) 4 high speed serial channels (approx 10Mbit/sec per channel) When you stick several of these boards together they work in concert to get a job done very fast. The OS used is Helios, which will attomatically sense the number of transpters available and allocate jobs accordingly. The chips (212,414,420) are pin/instruction compatable so you can just pop a faster one in and away you go (now wouldn't it be nice (cheap too) if the 68K line did that?) The transputer board establishes an interface between the 68x00 and the transputer. You can then by more transputers (with up to 4 on a board) and connect them to the transputer interface card. On paper the 2000B can have up to 25 connected to it. Because of the serial channels, you can network the whole thing to other similarly equiped amigas to get 65K+ transputers running together (thats 65256). Rumour has it that this never hit the shelves because motorola's 68040 offers better price/performance ratio. As far as I know this product is vaporware (in the us at least) and has only been demo'd but never released. The board is good for high speed graphics that need heavy math (fractals, ray tracing, etc..) Credit for this info goes to the following people: xanthian@zorch.sf-bay.org com259h@monu1.cc.monash.oz p.j.vossler@exeter.ac.uk Thanx guys! p.j.vossler said that Solid State Leisure was r&d'ing one to be released in the new year and com259h said that the german company already has one finished. All three mentioned Inmos. So I guess these companies are reliable candidates. PS: If you find out anything new, or get in contact with any of these companies... I would be happy to know.. Please Email me anything you may find... Hope all of this helps.... l8r GOJ@GJ (SUNYAB)