| T.R | Title | User | Personal
Name | Date | Lines |
|---|
| 226.1 | | BAGELS::BRANNON | Dave Brannon | Fri Sep 16 1988 21:06 | 20 |
| re: software to match the hardware
My impression is that the competition is also waiting for Helios to be
finished. Nice hardware, but when the OS is done... then the
market will get really interesting.
I read an interview with the Commodore Germany manager in charge
of their transputer project. He said the hardware was all done,
it plugs into an amiga bus slot on the Amiga 2000 and uses the Amiga
as an I/O front end.
The catch is that Helios isn't ready yet. The article had pictures
of the board and a diagram showing how the each daughter board
(with up to 4 transputers per board) plug into the ibm pc slots for power.
It looked real, not vapor. Evidently interfacing to a front end
operating system or building the hardware isn't the tough part.
It's waiting for Tim King & Co. to finish Helios.
-Dave
|
| 226.2 | <I've seen it. I'VE SEEN IT!!> | HAMPS::BURNS_K | SWAS Basingstoke England | Mon Sep 19 1988 08:20 | 10 |
| 226.3 | Abaq real but no CD ROM! | RDGENG::KEANE | | Mon Sep 19 1988 10:56 | 20 |
|
Hi Ref *.2 above,
I saw it as well at the show, very impressive demo of graphics,
but not much else, whilst I was there.
The CD Rom was conspicuous by its absence AGAIN!!
There was a nice ATaru stand with lots of commercial software demos
going on.
One thing I noticed was I saw about a dozen people carrying Amigas
out of the show, but only one carrying an ST. Does this meane the
AMiga is now the "in" machine, or has everybody who wants an ST
got them??
Cheers
Pat K.
|
| 226.4 | | 21850::WEAVER | Laboratory Data Products | Mon Sep 19 1988 19:24 | 12 |
| Helios is important to Perihelion for more than just the Abaq,
discussions I had with an Inmos engineer a while back implied that.
Helios is probably going to be the operation system for the T800,
as such Perihelion is probably making damn sure they do it right,
there are probably a lot of simulator bucks riding on successful
completion. Treat this as pure speculation.
By the way, there is already a flight simulator running on the T800's,
and might be made available for the Abaq, this simulator can support
multiple users, and increased capabilities based on processors used.
-Dave
|
| 226.5 | | BAGELS::BRANNON | Dave Brannon | Mon Sep 19 1988 21:38 | 6 |
| re: .3
Interesting about those Amigas :-) Maybe the price got low enough.
Were they 500s or 2000s?
-dave
|
| 226.6 | | ODIHAM::POORE | Stuart Poore, SRAC, Basingstoke, UK | Tue Sep 20 1988 15:50 | 5 |
| 226.7 | Did I Read Right? | EXPRES::FISTER | | Wed Sep 28 1988 11:09 | 4 |
| Question...built-in 520? Last word I heard, you needed
to use a MegST to interface. Does this mean the ABAQ is going to
be stand-alone? The price starts looking better, if this is true...
|
| 226.8 | Power to the people | RDGENG::PATIL | | Wed Sep 28 1988 14:54 | 17 |
|
There are currently two versions from what I have heard. One is
stand-alone and has a 68000 with 512K RAM for I/O. The second comes
without the 68000 and is designed to interface to a mega ST, I think
there is some hardware lacking in the 520ST. The basic price is
#3000 for the stand-alone version with the other version being about
#200 less. However to view the very high-res graphics you will need
a very expensive monitor (#1000+) such as a NEC multisync+ atleast.
There is an article in personal computing monthly I think (if you
live in the UK that is). It apparently shows a T800 out drystoning
an 8600. If I get it I will stick the article in this note.
Alan
P.S. Judging from the reports I have read the basic ABAQ will eat
alive a SUN in terms of power for a lot less money.
|
| 226.9 | | LEDS::ACCIARDI | | Wed Sep 28 1988 18:19 | 9 |
|
Lots of 68020/68881 based machines will out-dhrystone and out-seive an
8600.
Can you post any actual benchmarks? I have data on several
configurations of Suns, Vaxes, and 68020/68881 Amigae.
Ed.
|
| 226.10 | Some Benchmarks | RDGENG::PATIL | | Thu Sep 29 1988 17:27 | 80 |
|
Here's a brief summary of the article in Computer Shopper (UK mag)
with some benchmarks. I don't know how accurate these benchmarks
are however since it does not say anything on how the tests were
carried out or anything
BASIC ABAQ
----------
The basic ABAQ will be available with a built in ST or as an add-on
for any mega ST's. The stand-alone unit has a mega ST with 512K
which can be expanded. It is also worth noting that the built-in
ST has a reduced chip count of 2 (as opposed to 10 in a normal ST)
due to developements in design from the portable ST. Both versions
will have probably a 40MB hard disc (30ms access time) and an SCSI
interface. There is also the possibility of a removable disc pac
style hard disc. The machine also has built in networking facilities
consisting of 4 bidirectional links running at 2.3MB/sec so all
you need to network is a cable, no cards, no software. The maximum
addressing abilities of a single ABAQ is 64MB (not clear if additional
farm cards will increase this limit).
INMOS TRANSPUTER (T800)
-----------------------
The basic T800 transputer on the main board runs at 17.5MHz (not
20 MHz) but all other transputers on the farm cards may run at 20
MHz (or 30MHz if they are T800-30 versions). The T800 has an on-chip
fpu and 4K of RAM. It also has 4 links which are specially designed
to talk to 4 other transputers at 10 MB/sec simultaneously. Since
the FPU(64 bit) is on the same chip as the CPU the T800 does not
suffer performance penalties trying to talk to a separate FPU chip
as a 80386 would with a 80387 ( I think BYTE stated that for some
floating point calculations a 80286 would beat a 80286/80287 simply
because of the time in sending and recieving data from the two chips).
Benchmarks
Whetstones/sec
Processor single double
---------------------------------------------------------------
80286/80287 -8Mhz | 300K -
Inmos T414 -20MHz | 663K -
NS 32332/32081 -15Mhz | 728K -
MC 68020/68881 -16/12.5 | 755K -
Sun 3 | 860K 790K
ATT 32000/32100 | 1000K -
VAX 11/780 | 1083K 715K
80386/80387 -20MHz | 1800K -
Fairchild Clipper -33MHZ | 2200K -
Inmos T800 -20MHz | 4000K -
Inmos T800 -30MHz | 6000K 2500K
------------------------------------------------------------------
Processor Drystones/sec
------------------------------------------
VAX 8600 | 6423K
80386 -16MHz | 4300K
68020 -17MHz | 3977K
80286 -9MHz | 1976K
VAX 11/780 | 1650K
T800 -20MHz | 8547K
------------------------------------------
T800 floating point timing @20MHz (The times in () are @30MHz)
Operation Single length Double length
-----------------------------------------------------------
add | 350ns (233ns) 350ns(233ns)
subtract | " " " "
multiply | 550ns (367ns) 1000ns(667ns)
divide | 850ns (567ns) 1600ns(1067ns)
-----------------------------------------------------------
T800 -20MHz is rated at 1.5MFlops
T800 -30MHz 2.25MFlops
I'll post some more stuff on the blitter tomorrow.
Alan
|
| 226.11 | T800's and the meaning of life | RDGENG::PATIL | | Fri Sep 30 1988 15:39 | 40 |
|
Here's some more info on the ABAQ (It'll probably be called something
else when launched as somebody else uses it too) courtesy of PCW
who have done some good articles on transputers.
BLITTER
-------
The ABAQ has a colour blitter (as opposed to a monochrome blitter
in the Amiga) called Charity. It is designed to do colour blitter
operations, bit blits and has a 2-D video mapping function.
To do the bit blits a video mapping function can convert a block
of bit-mapped display to a series of bytes since byte manipulations
are quicker. The main difference between Charity and a blitter in
the Amiga is that in colour operations like XOR are meaningless.
Instead operations that take into account foreground,background
and object colours are necessary so that an object can move over
a background without moving bits of the background as well. To get
some idea of the speed it can do 4 comparisons on 8 pixels ( 8 bytes
not bits) in one memory cycle. It can also move 16 million monochrome
pixels/sec while doing comparisons on them. When plotting characters
on the screen it can plot them at 64 million pixels/sec aligning
each character to any pixel.
As for the speed of the ABAQ the major advantage is that once the
competition catches up in terms of speed you just buy a farm card
and get a four fold increase in power (assuming its a basic ABAQ).
Also other users in a distributed network get to use the additional
power when you are not using your workstation. And if you stay late
you get to use all the transputers in the whole net which is ideal
for supercomputer applications!!!
Alan
P.S. I won't be able to put anymore transputer info since it's back
to university next week. If I get back here during the Christmas
vacation I'll post some more intresting stuff on T800's and the meaning
of life (with any luck I'll be able to use some of the T800's at
college)
|
| 226.12 | | BAGELS::BRANNON | Dave Brannon | Fri Sep 30 1988 23:29 | 7 |
| Charity sounds like an interesting approach to blitting color.
Is Atari making that chip, or is from the transputer folks?
Since you mentioned the Amiga blitter... will the ST front end
have the ST blitter? Or will Charity take care of screen updates?
-dave
|
| 226.13 | | TENERE::DEIGHTON | | Thu Oct 06 1988 21:53 | 14 |
| Re .0
I don't think this would be the first stand alone transputer bases computer,
I believe a company was formed by some Inmos people about three or four years
ago to build systems based on the transputer. Their product is called the
Connection Machine unless I'm mistaken.
Having been peripherally interested in Transputers for about 6 years I'd dearly
like to be able to afford to add an Abac to my ST (I once tried interesting my
former employers who make PABX systems in investigating transputers for
communications applications with about the same success I've had here!).
Maybe Inmos should concentrate on development and ICE tools before the next hike
in clock speed, adding memory management or higher bandwidth busses?
|