Transputer chips

Because the transputer has a 32-bit processor and fast access to considerable quantities of on-chip RAM, it has been called a computer on a chip. Transputers are inherently faster than microprocessors, which have to refer to RAM outside the chip on which they reside. Thus the 100-nsec cycle time used in the above illustration may be only 50 nsec when carried out on the transputer chip. 

Transportation Index Transport phenomena Transposons Transputer chips Transuranic waste Transuranium elements... 

Transputers. At higher levels of coimectedness there is a wide variety of parallel computers. A great many parallel computers have been built using INMOS Transputer chips. Individual Transputer chips mn at 2 MELOPS or greater. Transputer chips have four communication channels, so the chips can readily be intercoimected into a two-dimensional mesh network or into any other interconnection scheme where individual nodes are four-coimected. Most Transputer systems have been built as additions to existing host computers and are SIMD type. Each Transputer has a relatively small local memory as well as access to the host s memory through the interconnection network. Not surprisingly, problems that best utilize local memory tend to achieve better performance than those that make more frequent accesses to host memory. Systems that access fast local memory and slower shared memory are often referred to as NUMA, nonuniform memory access, architecture. 

A typical transputer architecture. The transputer (sometimes referred to as a computer on a chip) has four input/output links (0, 1, 2, 3) to other transputers, a channel for inputting/requesting data (event link), some built-in random-access memory, an interface to the main operating system (clock, boot, etc.), and an external memory interface. Internal communication is via a bus. 

There can be little doubt that the pioneering work of dementi and coworkers provided much impetus for subsequent developments, many of which were based on implementing the replicated data methods, initially developed on the LCAP systems, onto more affordable microprocessor-based hardware platforms typified by the Transputer and i860 RISC chip. 

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