jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (Jim Wright) (08/10/89)
In article <44ed9575.71d0@apollo.HP.COM> rehrauer@apollo.COM (Steve Rehrauer) writes: | In article <30438@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> mitchell@janus.berkeley.edu (Evan Mitchell) writes: | > [a question begging for flames] | [a response delightfully void of flames] | | Oops, forgot about the wonderfully sexy Transputer-based box, what | they now call the "ATW", I guess. Hey, that's actually shipping! Oh, | in Europe... To developers... For about what a NeXT or MAC IIx | costs... Not much software for it yet either (not much for a NeXT | either, but at least that's a sexier box :)... Hmmm. Is this the box that was recently shown at siggraph in Boston? Infoworld said: "... 3-D graphics engine for PCs designed to shade and display 3-D color models in real time ... sits in a separate box and connects to PC compatibles and other computers through a SCSI interface ... rated to perform 1 million 3-D matrix transformations per second and can process more than 190,000 clipped and projected polygons per second ... will drive any standard multisynchronous monitor designed to work with a standard VGA card ... 65,000 colors from a palette of 16 million at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels ... uses a single Inmos T800 transputer and custom ASICs ... under $12,000 ..." Are transputers really this hot? Should we be screaming for the oft-discussed transputer board? Certainly not at that price, but... :-) -- Jim Wright jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu
daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) (08/11/89)
in article <1321@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>, jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (Jim Wright) says: > Are transputers really this hot? Should we be screaming for the oft-discussed > transputer board? Certainly not at that price, but... :-) Transputers (T800 style) have pretty hot 4-function floating point math (looks about mid-point between 68882 speed and 68040 speed, to pick on two chips I know better). Integer-wise, they're in the same ballpark as a simple 68020, depending on what you tell one to do. The interface to external memory is pretty bogus, but the chip's got 4k of on-chip RAM (not cache) which is very fast, so for a dedicated single task, a T800 can be pretty decent. They've got built in link interfaces to hook up multiple Transputers together, though that's not quite as amazing as the Transputer enthusiasts would have you think, especially considering the inflated price of the T800 as compared to other 32 bit CPUs. > Jim Wright -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Systems Engineering) "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: D-DAVE H BIX: hazy Be careful what you wish for -- you just might get it