Hands-On with the Inmos Transputer Part 1: Introduction

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/hands-on-with-the-inmos-transputer-part-1-introduction

by rbanffy • 3 years ago

3 1 3 years ago

1827162• 3 years ago

I used to play around with these (ST20 core) when I was younger, they were embedded into the STMicroelectronics STi5518 set top box chips, which I happened to have the full datasheet to. A weird stack based architecture, each instruction was a single byte if I remember correctly. And it had a hardware scheduler. Because of the stack based architecture, the task switch was very fast indeed.

There also was an ANSI C compiler (from the 1980s) with source code available, and I managed somehow to get this to build on a Linux machine at the time.

I got most of the peripheral hardware working, could even display MPEG-2 still images and play MP3 files streamed over the JTAG interface. But I never got full video decode working. You could also overclock it to 180MHz, which is much faster than it's specified 81MHz clock rate.

https://www.datasheetcatalog.com/datasheets_pdf/S/T/I/5/STI5...

The last chip that STMicroelectronics manufactured which featured a transputer core is STi5119ALC. It runs at over 200MHz and supports VGA RGB progressive scan output. You can get it from AliExpress, so it shouldn't be too hard to get a board made with the chip and a DDR SDRAM for experiments. I think the STLink (which is a modified transputer link) even works, so you can chain the chips together.

Hands-On with the Inmos Transputer Part 1: Introduction

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