[w34]

By the way our dissertation is online and easy to access: http://www.opentransputer.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/dis...

To answer the XMOS question: XMOS's design was quite heavily influenced by the original Transputer and therefore they are quite similar. The one major difference to note that we're a stack machine.

XMOS uses registers and is limited to 8 threads per core in most of their architectures. So if you suddenly want to go large and build a massively distributed system you might have to take into consideration that on each individual XMOS chip you can only run 8 processes at a time and might have to change your software.

With our stack machine approach you can run the same program that may basically consist of an unlimited number of processes (as long as you have enough memory to store them that is) on either just one single Transputer or -- with no change to your program -- on an array of (unlimited) Transputers with each Transputer running one process.

So the entire architecture makes scaling easier.

I also think the way we talk to peripherals is different to XMOS but I'd have to check up on that. I've used XC and XMOS boards before as part of my degree here at Bristol but I never connected peripherals and then interfaced them on their boards.