29 May
2011
29 May
'11
11:32 a.m.
In article <BANLkTi=jO-trzsc7G9uttqz_ysccsc0jwQ at mail.gmail.com>,
William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> writes:
Well, I've had my eye out for them for some time and at least where
I've looked, they're still pricey.
For the same
reason anyone implements any other CPU in an FPGA -- so
you can use that CPU architecture in a modern design or as a hardware
simulation of a vintage design.
If a hobbyist wants to play with Transputers, the easiest thing to do
is just wait until some become available. The things have been
floating to the surface for some time now, probably because of
hoarding. The Transputer story reflects the whole MPP industry
of the 1980s -
lots of neat ideas, and lots of "close, but no cigars". Meiko, Convex
Exemplar, Thinking Machines, Maspar. Lots of what we learned falls
into "what not to do" territory.
Well, Meiko *is* a transputer machine, so its not another example of
failure. By MPP I'm assuming you mean message-passing parallelism? As
opposed to symmetric multi-processing?
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>