Product category:
Embedded Computing and Control
News Release from: Nallatech | Subject: BenBlue-III
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 30 September 2004
FPGA module embeds supercomputer
performance
The BenBlue-III combines teraOPS computing, high memory bandwidth and multigigabit I/O, allowing designers to host processing-intensive applications on industry standard form factors and interfaces.
The new BenBlue-III module from Nallatech combines teraOPS flexible computing, high memory bandwidth and multigigabit I/O, allowing designers to host processing-intensive applications using industry standard form factors and interfaces including PCI, PC/104+, cPCI and VME The Nallatech BenBlue-III FPGA-based processing module can be configured with up to two Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs, each containing up to four embedded PowerPC processors on-chip
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 26 Apr 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Eight banks of high bandwidth ZBT RAM provide 72Mbyte of fast access local storage in addition to the FPGA's on-chip block RAMs and distributed RAMs.
By also exploiting the Virtex-II Pro 2.5Gbit/s Rocket-I/O transceivers and multigigabit Dime-II motherboard connections, the new module has memory and I/O bandwidth to maximise its high processing performance.
BenBlue-III uses Nallatech's Dime-II architecture to ensure easy integration, including integration with existing systems.
Further reading
FPGA-centric platform for a terabit future
The Benera is a reconfigurable computing platform that Nallatech claims takes FPGA systems to TeraOPS performance.
FPGA cores aim to beat DSPs at floating point
Nallatech has launched a fully IEEE754-compliant single-precision floating-point core library which now allows Xilinx's FPGAs to exceed the floating-point performance of the latest DSPs.
The module can be hosted using appropriate motherboards in Windows and Linux systems running Nallatech's Fuse system software.
System communication is easily implemented using the Nallatech Dimetalk connectivity tool, which now has additional support for BenBlue-III.
Application development is straightforward, leveraging BenBlue-III product features and supporting infrastructure.
Standard software development environments are supported through Fuse APIs for Java, C++ and Matlab.
All Nallatech products support multiple FPGA design flows, including VHDL, Xilinx System Generator and Handel-C, along with other high-level environments.
Industry standard synthesis and implementation tools, including Xilinx ISE are also supported.
Interfacing to the ZBT memory and high-speed serial I/O channels is effortless, using the optimised controller cores and reference designs provided.
The available FPGAs for BenBlue-III include the Xilinx 2VP70 and 2VP100 Virtex-II Pro devices.
These options enable up to 250,272 programmable logic cells, 20Mbit of embedded block RAM memory, 1112 multipliers and eight IBM Power PC processors on one module.
The extensive logic resources of the Virtex-II Pro architecture are supported by high-speed and deterministic on-chip interconnects to deliver teraOPS processing power, capable of performing a target application many times faster than a conventional high-performance processor or DSP.
BenBlue-III therefore raises the bar for high performance computing by enabling supercomputer performance in industry-standard form factors.
BenBLUE-III will be available from December 2004.
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