Things change… or do they?

The world has changed a lot in the last 18 years.

In 1990 I started working on my DPhil (PhD to the rest of ya) with sponsorship from Inmos Ltd in the UK – then a part of SGS-Thompson Microelectronics (having been passed like a hot potato from public ownership by the UK Government, on to Thorn-EMI and then…).

Little known outside of the UK and Europe, Inmos did some very interesting things – the key one of which was the design of the Inmos Transputer.

Inmos Transputer Burn-in Card

Unfortunately the Transputer never quite made the big-time – price was a big factor. But this little chip introduced some really radical concepts into the world. Eighteen years later and the rest of the microelectronics world is catching up. We now have a problem – more cores than we know what to do with, and a whole new model of programming that people in the embedded and desktop worlds are going to have to get their heads firmly around… Note the above board – 42 x 30MHz RISC CPUs with IEEE754-1985 floating point units on board. An aggregate 1.26GIPS – not bad for 1990.

For anyone really interested in the Transputer, Prof. David May is your man. His musings on the Transputer (which I hope he will embellish in the future) may be found here. Also, an interesting recent article by the good Professor regarding the whole concurrent programming problem may be found here.

My inspiration for starting this blog is to brain-dump some of the ideas that have come from my experience starting with the Transputer family, and working forwards through how many of the ideas and concepts I learned at that time and since, apply to modern design problems.

This blog I intend to be a hands-on, in-depth, thinking about the meta-problem kind of approach to modern embedded and desktop systems middle- and low-level design issues.

I hope you enjoy it.

Cheers
Don