The Transputer in your Browser

We remember when the transputer first appeared. Everyone “knew” that it was going to take over everything. Of course, it didn’t. But [Oscar Toledo G.] gives us a taste of …read more

Apr 5, 2025 - 03:02

We remember when the transputer first appeared. Everyone “knew” that it was going to take over everything. Of course, it didn’t. But [Oscar Toledo G.] gives us a taste of what life could have been like with a JavaScript emulator for the transputer, you can try in your browser.

If you don’t recall, the transputer was a groundbreaking CPU architecture made for parallel processing. Instead of giant, powerful CPUs, the transputer had many simple CPUs and a way to chain them all together. Sounds great, but didn’t quite make it. However, you can see the transputer’s influence on CPUs even today.

Made to work with occam, the transputer was built from the ground up for concurrent programming. Context switching was cheap, along with simple message passing and hardware scheduling.

The ersatz computer has a lot of messages in Spanish, but you can probably muddle through if you don’t hablar español. We did get the ray tracing example to work, but it was fairly slow.

Want to know more about the CPU? We got you. Of course, these days, you can emulate a transputer with nearly anything and probably outperform the original. What we really want to see is a GPU emulation.