Design
The transputer (the name deriving from transistor and computer) was the first general purpose microprocessor designed specifically to be used in parallel computing systems. The goal was to produce a family of chips ranging in power and cost that could be wired together to form a complete parallel computer. The name was selected to indicate the role the individual transputers would play: numbers of them would be used as basic building blocks, just as transistors had earlier.
Originally the plan was to make the transputer cost only a few dollars per unit. Inmos saw them being used for practically everything, from operating as the main CPU for a computer to acting as a channel controller for disk drives in the same machine. Spare cycles on any of these transputers could be used for other tasks, greatly increasing the overall performance of the machines.
Even a single transputer would have all the circuitry needed to work by itself, a feature more commonly associated with microcontrollers. The intention was to allow transputers to be connected together as easily as possible, without the requirement for a complex bus (or motherboard). Power and a simple clock signal had to be supplied, but little else: RAM, a RAM controller, bus support and even an RTOS were all built in.
Read more about this topic: Transputer
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