DO YOU KNOW WHAT A TRANSPORTER IS? By Jos Kirps.
The transputer (TRANSistor comPUTER) was an innovative computer design of the 1980s from INMOS, a British semiconductor company based in Bristol. When the transputer was first reveiled, many thought this exceptional concept should be the next revolution in microprocessor technology. As you may already have guessed, things didn't happen as expected: today, the transputer is a largely forgotten concept (although some initial ideas may be found in modern processor architectures).
In the early 1980s it became clear that conventional CISC processors were very limited in terms of scalable performance. One concept to solve the problem was RISC, which became the defacto standard for high performance workstations in the late 1990's. As RISC architectures were quite expensive in most cases (although ARM was not), the transputer was intended to offer high end performance without being costy.The idea behind the transputer was quite simple: instead of creating a very complex processor, the transputer consisted of a family of chips. Each chip had a very simple design and multiple chips could be wired together to form an entire computer. Each transputer chip was in fact some kind of a microcontroller and was able to boot and operate by itself, it had its own RAM, a serial bus and an embedded real-time OS, but it fulfilled only very few complex tasks. Computer vendors would then combine transputer chips like building blocks and design a system that would fulfill specific requirements.
