29 May
2011
29 May
'11
7:26 a.m.
On 5/29/11 10:20 AM, William Donzelli wrote:
Inmos managed to miss both of those targets, although
I am hesitant to
call it a complete commercial failure. They managed to sell a good few
of them, but not the "take over the world" amount they certainly were
boasting about. The simple systems worked fairly well, due to the raw
speed of the processors, but the massive systems stumbled because of
the networking. Things basically did not scale well.
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.
--
Will, sacred cow tipper
[reminds self to send Will a book about array processor design]
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL