[zozbot234]

> More of a parallel universe that didn’t work out

Neuromorphic chips are built essentially the same way. The individual compute units are dog slow and only have tiny scratchpad memories (just like the elementary "SoC's" of a transputer), but you can etch many more of them on any given piece of silicon and they sip power compared to a standard CPU or even GPU, so the total amount of compute is significantly increased.

[fidotron]

Neuromorphic chips tend to be SIMD (or effectively so) which is not the case with transputers, which were also not intended to be slow CPUs when they were introduced! With transputers it was up to the PCB designer to choose the topology of the links between nodes, and they were very fast for the time.

AFAIK no one ever put multiple transputers in an array in one package because it exposes one of the key flaws of the idea which is if you arrange them in a pipeline but only one of them has a flaw the whole thing is broken. That is a huge part of why the GPU style design has won for massive parallelism.