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by alexisread 456 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.