This page was updated on:  Thursday, January 06, 2000

Atari Transputer Workstation
(ABAQ)

Atari Transputer Workstation (ATW)The Atari Transputer Workstation, also known as the ABAQ, or ATW-800, was first shown at the 1987 Comdex.

The basic architecture of the ATW was built around the INMOS T800-20 CPU.  The INMOS T800-20 Transputer itself is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Chip) based processor operating at 50MHz and contains a floating-point arithmetic logic unit.  There is 4K of RAM on the chip as well.  It is, essentially, an entire computer on a chip.

The ATW was designed for some serious parallel processing.  It had the ability to connect multiple Transputers to work in unison.  The Transputers could be housed on a card in the tower case, with the ability to add additional cards as necessary, or as an add-on connected to an Atari Mega ST via the expansion bus.

The system also featured distributed processing capabilities.  The ATW workstations could be networked together for shared tasks.  For example, if one system is busy performing tasks, and another system is idle, the Transputers in the idle system would kick in and assist with the task being performed on the first system.

The ATW used a 32-bit bus.   It also has a special "Blossom" video adapter with a modified blitter chip.  (Unfortunately, I do not know what makes it different from a standard Atari blitter chip used in the Mega ST systems.)  It came standard with four megabytes of RAM, which could be upgraded to 120 meg.  The hard disk interface was SCSI, and the standard hard drive was 40mb.

All I/O on the system was controlled via a Motorola 68000 processor, that operated completely independent of the Transputers.  This allowed the Transputers to focus on raw data processing, and not have to handle simple tasks like mouse control and keyboard input.  The basic I/O ports were essentially the same as a stock ST system, including MIDI ports, a DMA port, and the serial/parallel ports.

The operating system was Helios, which was a new flavor of UNIX designed specifically for parallel data processing.  The Helios Operating System (HOS) was designed by Dr. Tim King of Perihelion Software Ltd.  Dr. King is also known as the creative force behind Atari ST BASIC, and Amiga DOS.

Atari Transputer Workstation "Farm Card"The photo on the right is of a Transputer "Farm Card."  Each of these "Farm Cards" has multiple Transputer processors (the gold chips) installed.

Dr. Tim King, one of the creators of the system, was interviewed in Vol. 4, Issue 4 of STart Magazine.  In that interview, he is states that a fully stocked ATW has over 1/5 the processing power of a Cray supercomputer.

Early specifications stated that the ATW could hold 3 Transputers per card, that was eventually increased to 4 per card, which would give the ATW a maximum of 17 Transputers (internally) per system, since one Transputer was built on the motherboard.  According to Atari's sales brochure, an unlimited number of Transputer "farm cards" could be added externally.

Atari Transputer Workstation (ATW)And speaking of the motherboard, it was huge to say the least.  I have a photo of it, but it is too big to post here to the site.

The photo on the left is from a prototype model of the ATW.  The Transputer "farm cards" are installed in the expansion connectors on the top of the motherboard. The metal cages on the left of the case are for hard drives, and a floppy drive.  The power supply is located in the lower right of the case.

The system was fairly pricey.   The base configuration cost roughly $8,000.  Each of the "farm cards" cost roughly $5,000.

So what was all of this processing power used for?  It was capable of displaying up to 16.7 million colors, so Atari envisioned using the system for high end graphics workstations (specifically animation and 3D modeling), and in medical applications.

This system pioneered may fault-tolerant features that are commonplace in the high-end workstations & servers that are used today.  For example, if a Transputer chip broke down, the entire machine could still operate with the remaining Transputers.

All of the specs here may not sound all that impressive when compared to the modern systems we have today.   However, think about this....  According to Dr. King, says that rendering procedures that take 3 1/2 hours to compute on the state of the art PC's of the era (Intel 386 based) could be done in 9 seconds on an ATW.  For the 1987-1989 time frame, that was quite an impressive feat that no one else could touch.

It is speculated, depending on who you ask, that only 50 to 400 of these powerful machines were ever built.

It is difficult to see on the photo at the top of this page, but there is a front panel unit with a series of lights and status displays.  They are: