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by nextts 469 days ago
Bold. In a different timeline they could have been the nvidia.
2 comments

Absolutely: https://www.transputer.net/tn/46/tn46.html

Too bad the UK gov were so shortsighted, or that Atari, instead of making the ATW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation)

should have simply used a T212 in the ST blitter socket as a coprocessor. That way people could have slowly gotten familiar with the arch :|

People are building new hardware to run transputers though: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/369254-pre-annoucement-atw... so maybe this amazing code can be resurrected on real hardware!

Edit: Found it. This is the paper on 3d parallel transforms: https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/611934...

Later transputers also had DSP instructions built-in.

The modern descendant of this stuff (intersecting group of people and ideas) is at https://www.xmos.com/

The target is the embedded space now, though.

Later model STs had an expansion connector on the PCB, it wouldn't have needed to be instead of the blitter.
“Parallel implementation of backpropagation neural networks on a heterogeneous array of transputers”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18255845/

I like how it isn't laced with superlatives too. Unlike today's papers that sound like a (well educated) used car salesman.