The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi,

I remember reading about Transputers in Quanta, but I got no reply to a letter sent to see if I could buy one or even make one.

Seems typical of QL hardware, lots of people things, but the never appear, which still happening now...

A little thought for Christmas.

NormanDunbar wrote: ↑Sat Oct 15, 2022 5:10 pmI always wanted a Transputer, Even if I had to learn Occam to program it.

The penny just dropped why the transputer was effectively taken out of the hands of the common people apart from its commercial bashing capability of the Intel and AMD complex chips. Back in the day the Cray was the supercomputer that could crack government encryption in three days and its sale was controlled but the off the shelf Transputer threatened encryption since any Tom Dick or Harry could buy and build a super computer if they had the resources. The transputer didn't die they renamed it as a T800 graphics processor and limited the sales to, government in the pocket, graphics card manufacturers.
http://www.transputer.net/tn/37/
All the graphics card GPUs are using the Transputer idea of small interconnected processors and then a select few companies started making super computers using the GPUs.
https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/23/ ... computers/
Now the GPUs have had the benefit of large scale integration at the nm level effectively giving thousands of Transputers on a GPU.
https://www.top500.org/news/new-gpu-acc ... he-top500/
The Transputer wins I think. Four Pico chips are no match for a GPU with thousands of processors.
Happy Christmas.

Maybe the idea for a QL Transputer came from the fact that Atari had made one:

http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/atw800/index.htm

I haven't gone back to read the Quanta articles on this so maybe Leon references the Atari in them...

The computers in the days of the Transputer could only ever be the simple VDU like human interface. Having seen in Linux, when I was looking for a graphics driver, there are capabilities to program GPUs I can't see the point in experimenting with 4 Picos when there are thousands of CPUs on a GPU. Not knowing anything about GPUs further reading has turned up that they are used in crypto currency mining. A common unit is to have 8 graphics cards in a module doing the number crunching but it looks like you need a lot of units to make it worth while & a free electricity source to make a profit.

Hi,

There was a M212 Transputer Hard Disc intrface for the QL featured in Quanta Volume 6 Issue 1, 2

The circuit diagram was printed in the Volume 6 Issue 2 magazine.

I wrote to the designer, asking to support his development or possibily sell me one. But he never wrote back, I bought a Miracle hard disk interface.