Inmos was a British semiconductor company which made a series of CPUs it called Transputers in the late 1980s-early 1990s.
Transputers were novel in that they combined a CPU core with a set of high-speed network links: the CPU ran at, eg. 20MHz and the four network links at 20Mbps.
Paired with this hardware was the programming language Occam, which was derived from the ideas of Tony Hoare's CSP, and included concurrency and communications primitives that mapped directly onto the Transputer hardware.
The end result was a system in which it was easy to configure a parallel machine with a mesh, torus, or tree of CPUs that could then run CSP-style concurrent programs very effectively.
While it saw some success in various niches (image and signal processing, for instance), the Transputer CPUs did not support other popular languages of the time (C, Pascal, Fortran, etc) well, and for various reasons, Inmos was unable to evolve the design to match the performance of (in particular) the Intel x86 family. From an initial position of having competitive performance and superior concurrency and communication, the Transputer was quickly left behind, and its successor (the T9000-series) was obsolete before launch.
Quick note that there were compilers for other languages. Definitely C. Probably Pascal. Not sure about Fortran.
I think the failure to keep the single-CPU performance edge was probably mostly about lack of money vs the competitors. Obviously related to not selling enough of the first generation chips.
There were: Rowley did Modula2, there was a GCC port, there was an Ada port, and various others, commercial and open source. But the Transputer architecture, which was stack-based, didn't lend itself to easy ports of most existing compilers, and they were slow to arrive and slow when they did.
The article also discusses the reasons for the lack of follow-on investment.
Yes, I was taught Fortran* which featured built-in parallel calculations for matrix operations (which fed into Fortran 90 IIRC) as well as Occam, and was allowed to play with the university's Meiko Computing Surface (generating fractal landscapes in real time) but not actually allowed to program them.
Transputers were novel in that they combined a CPU core with a set of high-speed network links: the CPU ran at, eg. 20MHz and the four network links at 20Mbps.
Paired with this hardware was the programming language Occam, which was derived from the ideas of Tony Hoare's CSP, and included concurrency and communications primitives that mapped directly onto the Transputer hardware.
The end result was a system in which it was easy to configure a parallel machine with a mesh, torus, or tree of CPUs that could then run CSP-style concurrent programs very effectively.
While it saw some success in various niches (image and signal processing, for instance), the Transputer CPUs did not support other popular languages of the time (C, Pascal, Fortran, etc) well, and for various reasons, Inmos was unable to evolve the design to match the performance of (in particular) the Intel x86 family. From an initial position of having competitive performance and superior concurrency and communication, the Transputer was quickly left behind, and its successor (the T9000-series) was obsolete before launch.