A Closer Look At The Transputer

39 A CLOSER LOOK AT THE TRANSPUTER by Pete Chown The transputer is probably the most powerful microprocessor available today; ironically, it is also one of the least used. It is a RISC chip and a very powerful one. Its power stems mainly from its ability to join transputers and use them as a single unit, thus multiplying the power. The fastest transputers available today have a speed of 15 MIPs (millions of instructions per second) and 2-4 Mflops (millions of floating points operations). If you built a computer with a transputer, same time. it would be about the fastest desktop com- Inmos (who make the transputer; not to be confused with Intel, who make the 8086 series processors) have provided a langua- ge for programming it, called Occam, puter you could buy. It would be several times faster than a VAX 11/780. if you used four of these devices, your (still desk- top) computer would be faster than some mainframes with a speed equal to about 1/10 of a Cray-I. If you used fifty of ...