CompactPCI Board Does 840 MFLOPS With Seven SHARCs

Powered by seven 40-MHz ADSP-2106x digital signal processors (DSPs), as well as by up to 448 MB of DRAM with 560-MB/s overall memory bandwidth, the Goblin CompactPCI floating-point signal processing platform is geared to handling I/O intensive applications in the military, medical and telecomm industries. Of Goblin's seven resident SHARCs, only one functions as the CompactPCI bus interface, leaving the remaining six for high-speed processing: the powerful card can process a whopping 840 MFLOPS. The 6U-form-factor Goblin also sports 14 external link ports, allowing several of the cards to be connected together for even greater processing power. And each SHARC has six 40-MB/s link ports for connection to other SHARC processors and external link ports, as well as having 1 MB of flash for booting or non-volatile memory space. Goblin's CompactPCI bus interface provides direct 32-bit access to the host SHARC processor's IOP registers and its internal dual-port SRAM, allowing the host PC to reset and boot the host SHARC, load program images and examine memory.