heller@LISBOA.KS.UIUC.EDU (Helmut Heller) (07/25/90)
About two weeks ago I posted an inquiry about T800+i860 marriages. Since I was asked to summarize on the net I am doing so: 1) Thanks to all of you who replied to my inquiry (about 11 people). 2) I got to know of three vendors: - Transtech - MEiKO - MicroWay I have the addresses of all three, contacted them and they all sent some info material back. - INMOS has a VECTRAM which aims at the same market segment. 3) Since each company has a different approach I will describe each product seperately: TRANSTECH: TTM100: TRAM size6, 1 T805-25, 1 i860 @40MHz, 1 or 4 MByte local DRAM for Transputer, 4 or 16 MByte DRAM for i860, zero wait states, paged, shared with T805 by arbiter logic (interrupt driven) for communication T805 and i860 can operate in parallel, each, T805 or i860, can be "master", controlling the other processor module can be integrated in existing Transputer sytems, software support for TDS (occam), Toolset, 3L compilers special vector and lin. algebra libraries are available yet, how the software side actually works is not entirely clear to me no pricing information is available yet delivery time of at least 10 weeks MEiKO: MK086: Computing Surface board that plugs into MEiKO enclosures (M10) 2 * i860 @40MHz, each with 2 T800-25 (so there are 4 Transputers on this board) sharing 4, 8, 16 or 32 MBytes dual ported DRAM (the 2 Transputers provide a total of 8 links per i860 to somewhat balance the high computational power with communications) 2 MByte DRAM local to the 2 Transputers of each i860 the Transputers are communication slaves to the i860 board works only in the Computing Surface environment C and FORTRAN cross compilers for i860, source vectoriser and vec libs are available; pipelining and optimizing compilers are expected for Q3 1990 pricing: from 40000 US-$ for a single MK086A-0004, 80000 US-$ for a package (sparcstation-host, M10, MK086A-0004, software) up to, of course, unlimited MicroWay: Number-Smasher-i860: plugs into the AT-bus of PCs 1 i860 @33MHz or @40MHz, 8 to 32 MByte DRAM, no Transputers but 2 link adaptors FORTRAN, C and PASCAL compilers available pricing (including one compiler): 6000 US-$ @33Mhz - 7200 US-$ @40MHz, 8MByte DRAM INMOS: VECTRAM IMS B420: TRAM size4, 1 T800-25, 1 vector signal processor, 256kByte dual ported SRAM shared, 1MByte DRAM local to T800 T800 is master interrupt driven handshake between T800 and sig-proc. This info is condensed from brochures. I do not claim correctness nor will I be liable for anything. Cheers, Helmut _________________________________________________ Helmut Heller University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Beckman Institute Theoretical Biophysics Group Transputer Lab, Room 3151 405 N. Mathews Ave. Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A. Phone: (217)244-1586 e-mail: heller@lisboa.ks.uiuc.edu (internet) u27013@ncsagate.bitnet (bitnet) _________________________________________________ "Knowledge must be gathered and cannot be given" ZEN, one of BLAKES7