Conference 7.286::atarist

    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

    
    
    
    There was several ABAQ's on display at the Personal Computer Show
    (formally the PCW show) in London this week. A very brief chat
    suggested that it should be available by Christmas at a price of
    about �3000 inclusive.
    
    
    Keith.

    
    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.
    

    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

    re: .3
    
    Interesting about those Amigas :-)  Maybe the price got low enough.
    Were they 500s or 2000s?
    
    -dave

    All those Amigas where A500's for �349.00 . I was amazed how few people
    where selling Atari's. I bought one though, the old summer pack
    for the same price (�349.00). 
    
    		Stuart P.

    		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...
    

    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.    
    

    
    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.
    

    
    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

    
    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)
    

    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

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?