Has anybody heard of the ATW800 transputer workstation? The one that used a modified Atari ST motherboard as a glorified I/O controller for a T-series transputer? No, we hadn’t either, but transputer superfan [Axel Muhr] has created the ATW800/2, an Atari Transputer card, the way it was meant to be.
The transputer was a neat idea when it was conceived in the 1980s. It was designed specifically for parallel and scientific computing and featured an innovative architecture and dedicated high-speed serial chip-to-chip networking. However, the development of more modern buses and general-purpose CPUs quickly made it a footnote in history. During the same period, a neat transputer-based parallel processing computer was created, which leveraged the Atari ST purely for its I/O. This was the curious ATW800 transputer workstation. That flopped as well, but [Axel] was enough of a fan to take that concept and run with it. This time, rather than using the Atari as a dumb I/O controller, the card is explicitly designed for the Mega-ST expansion bus. A second variant of the ATW800/2 is designed for the Atari VME bus used by the STe and TT models—yes, VME on an Atari—it was a thing.
The card hosts an FPGA module, specifically the Tang 20k, that handles the graphics, giving the Atari access to higher resolutions, HDMI output, and GPU-like acceleration with the right code. The FPGA also contains a ‘synthetic’ transputer core, compatible with the Inmos T425, with 6Mb of RAM to play with. Additionally, the board contains an original Inmos C011 link adapter chip and a pair of size-1 TRAM slots to install two physical transputer cards. This allows a total of two transputers, each with its dedicated RAM, to be installed and networked with the synthetic transputer and the host system. The FPGA is configured to allow the host CPU and any of the transputers direct access to the video RAM, so with proper coding, the same display can mix 68K and parallel computing applications simultaneously. The original ATW800 couldn’t do that!
In addition to the transputer support and boosted graphics, the card also provides a ROM big enough to switch between multiple Atari TOS versions, USB loop-through ports to hook up to a lightning-ST board, and a MicroSD slot for extra local storage. What a project!
If you don’t know what the transputer is (or was), read our quick guide. Of course, forty-year-old silicon is rare and expensive nowadays, so if you fancy playing with some hardware, might we suggest using a Pi Pico instead?
Thanks to [krupkaj] for the tip!
The modern version of the Transputer and Occam are alive and kicking: buy them at DigiKey.
They are the XMOS xCORE processors (4000MIPS/chip, expandable) and xC.
Unique benefit: they give hard realtime processing guarantees, so you can time your code before the hardware is available. Key techniques: no cache, no interrupts, multicore with message passing.
Has anybody heard of the ATW800 transputer workstation?
Yes!
Occam and programming Transputers were part of my bachelors degree. We didn’t have fancy Atari Workstations, more of a open chassis thing, but it had more Transputers, and we could reconfigure the layout to optimize it for the processing problem.
I worked for an Atari reseller, and did a lot of work with the ATW800 system. I attended a Helios OS course by Tim King at Perihelion in the UK near Kent, visisted the development centre in Cambridge UK. Those were the days.
Then, together with a German man (Christian Schormann??), I ported the Mirashading 3-D renderer to the the transputer systems running Helios OS. This source code was in Pascal, so it was ported using Prospero Pascal, also by a UK company. Pure Pascal is a good choice for educational purposes, but not for real life projects. But it worked, and it was fun to see scenes being rendered in slices on your screen in parallel.
But Inmos, the company that created the transputer, could not deliver on time the successor of the T800 called the T8000. And the 486 PC became faster every month, and with 25 MHz it was already faster than a 32 cpu tranputer system equipped with cpu’s running at 1 MHz, while doing this at a fraction of the cost. So the commercial interest in the transputer died.
285 / 5.000
Hi Hugob, that sounds very interesting. Is any of the old stuff still available? I work on the ATW800/2 team, specifically for the transputer software, so they’re interested in everything. Or do you perhaps still have contact with Christian Schormann? Regards, Andre
Of course I know about it! I saw a real one once, and also a Transputer board in a Sinclair QL.
I wrote an article about the Abaq’s unique OS, HeliOS.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/06/heliosng/
It is FOSS now. Back in the day, later versions could run on multiple CPU architectures. It is an ideal fit for modern manycore CPUs, if someone only updated it and got it running on Arm64 or x86-64…
“I wrote an article about the Abaq’s unique OS, HeliOS.”
And still you’re writing it wrong ;-) It’s “Helios” – there are no intercaps, even it’s tempting.
And thanks Dave… I need to get myself a “Superfan” T-shirt now 😅
Helios/HeliOS… to settle this, may I propose the XKCD compromise?
https://xkcd.com/1167/
“HeLiOs” 😜
(Hi Liam, good to see you read some of the same sites I do when you’re not master of all things FOSS on El Reg)
I’m looking for Archipel Volvox software for Indigo host. http://regnirps.com/VolvoxStuff/Volvox.html