17 Mar
2007
17 Mar
'07
11:53 a.m.
Should have done some more Googling before I sent that.
On Sat, 17 Mar 2007, Andrew Back wrote:
- Backplane takes up to 7 cards, is marked
'Version A 22/10/89' and has 4 x
ceramic 80486 sized ICs marked 'NEC RSRE S01 8714K9'. I don't know what these
are but suspect they may be soft configurable devices for transputer link
routing.
Looks as though the 'RSRE' chip was a bespoke switching ASIC produced for
Supernode development partner Royal Signals & Radar Establishment.
"Esprit I P1085 project The work done under the Esprit I P1085 project [1]
partially funded by CEC was related the development and applications of a
low cost high performance multiprocessor machine. The project involved
Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE prime contractor) Inmos
Thorn-Emi CRL University of Southampton University of Liverpool Aptor
University of Grenoble(Imag) and Telmat Informatique. The objectives of
the project were to develop a highly parallel architecture based on
transputers and associated system software and applications. To achieve
this Inmos developed the T800 transputer starting from the T414 and the
consortium defined the whole machine architecture. Started in December
1985 this 3 years project led to significant industrial products: the T800
transputer the machine architecture and part of the associated software."
http://spiedl.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PSISD…
And I'm guessing based on the above and the fact the T800s are marked
'prequal' means they are samples or something?
Andrew