Share
Radstone Technology, the world’s leading independent supplier of rugged, high-performance, embedded computer products for defense and aerospace applications, announces the G4DSP-XE quad MPC7447 PowerPC card with planned support for ICS’s latest 5xx PMC range to create integrated Multimission Software Radio blades. G4DSP-XE processing power is delivered by 4x 1 GHz MPC7447 compute nodes to provide the massive processing performance needed for applications in Radar, Sonar, Signal Intelligence and EW. Each of the four compute nodes is comprised of a large amount of DDR SDRAM, FLASH, and a Marvell Discovery™ II dual 64-bit / 100 MHz PCI-X host bridge which lies at the heart of the G4DSP-XE’s AccelerX™ architecture. AccelerX, so called because of its ability to provide ultra fast internode PCI-X paths, is a loosely coupled PCI-X architecture allowing the simultaneous operation of four independent point-to-point PCI-X buses. The result of AccelerX is 1.6 GBps peak data transfer bandwidth between adjacent compute nodes and a total of 3.2 GBps peak on-board data transfer bandwidth (simultaneous). “G4DSP-XE represents the next level in quad PowerPC products from Radstone. The AccelerX architecture extends the innovations Radstone pioneered and proved on the first generation G4DSP to optimize processor to memory, internode, and PMC I/O bandwidth,” said Stuart Heptonstall, Radstone’s DSP Product Marketing Manager. To ease and accelerate applications software development, G4DSP-XE offers the developer 4x 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet ports (1 per node). These enable independent and simultaneous code development and debug on all four compute nodes allowing single or multiple developers to operate simultaneously on the four compute nodes. These Ethernet ports can also provide further high-speed data I/O paths for Command and Control or sensor I/O purposes. Mezzanine I/O support is facilitated by two PMC sites. Each PMC site is independent and unlike other architectures both are bridged from the internal AccelerX paths (as is VME). This bridging ensures PCI-X speeds are maintained and are not degraded by slower PMC speeds or slower external interfaces. Of particular interest are the latest data acquisition PMCs (ICS554, 564 & 572) from the recently acquired ICS Ltd, which will form a new range of Multimission Software Radio blades when coupled with the G4DSP-XE. “The combination of the G4DSP-XE’s compute power coupled with the clear advantages of the bridged AccelerX architecture makes it an ideal processing platform for our latest ADC and DAC PMCs. Offered as an integrated solution, the G4DSP-XE and ICS 5xx combinations will create Multimission Software Radio blades that offer the very best of both worlds in terms of acquisition and processing for transmit-receive applications in Radar, communications, SIGINT and EW,” stated Angsuman Rudra, Director of Radio Products at ICS Ltd. Additionally, G4DSP-XE supports Radstone’s PMC-StarLite Switched Fabric Interconnect PMC and the forthcoming StarCarry PMC carrier to provide very fast and flexible multiboard configurations. G4DSP-XE software support is as open and independent as possible to protect software investment and ease development. G4DSP-XE supports VxWorks with VxMP, Greenhills Integrity, LynxOS, Radstone’s Message Passing Library (RMP) and VSI/Pro VSIPL libraries (on top of VxWorks and LynxOS) from MPI Software Technology. All of this is backed up by Radstone’s Built-In-Test (BIT) software. Available in fully rugged air- and conduction-cooled formats the G4DSP-XE will be shipping in July 2004 with pricing starting at under $16,000 in 50off volume.