You can’t fake this feeling when a $4 microcontroller development board can be used as cutting-edge technology in the 1980s.This is the situation Working chip machine [Amen] Built with Raspberry Pi Pico.
For a comprehensive overview of the transputer, you should check [Jenny List’s] A longer article on the subject, but in the final analysis, we are talking about a chip architecture that is mostly forgotten by time. For parallel computing, each transputer chip has four serial communication links to connect to other transputers. [Amen] I wanted to play with this architecture from the beginning. It was expensive then and today, and finding multiple transputers is difficult and expensive. However, the RP2040 chip found on the Raspberry Pi Pico made him feel that it was the perfect way to simulate the design of a transputer.
The RP2040 chip on the Pico board has two programmable input/output blocks (PIO), and each PIO has four state machines. This matches perfectly with four transputer links (each link is bidirectional, so you need eight state machines). In addition, the link speed is specified as 10 MHz, which is completely within the capability of Pico, and since the RP2040 runs at 133 MHz, it is conceivable that the simulation core can approach the 20 MHz maximum speed of the original transputer.
Upgrading the hardware has been successful. In order to see what actually happened, [Amen] Procured some link adapter chips (IMSC011), and connected them to the computer through the Arduino Mega to use the keyboard and display. The transputer architecture allows code to be loaded via ROM or via link. The latter is currently running. The future plan is to find a better system to compile the code, because now the only way is to run the original INMOS compiler on the DOS of the virtual machine.
listen [Amen] Explain the project in the first of the six video series (so far).You can find links to other videos On his YouTube channel.