Out in Front: September 2, 1996

A family of VME boards based on the PowerPlus VME architecture dramatically increases CPU-to-main-memory bandwidth. These Motorola boards use a custom ASIC to control two-way interleaved memory access and take advantage of the PowerPC's address pipelining. They also employ a combination of FIFO memories, read-ahead transactions, and write posting to decouple the CPU-to-memory, PCI, and VME buses. The approach allows the processor to make full use of main-memory bandwidth with minimal impact from PCI-bus accesses. The result is main-memory access in excess of 400 Mbytes/sec.

The family's first members, the MVME 2600 and MVME 3600, share a common software and hardware structure. The boards incorporate Open Firmware, a PC firmware implementation that can boot diverse operating systems, including Windows NT and AIX. Both boards offer either a 200-MHz PowerPC 603 or a 166-MHz PowerPC 604 processor with fast Ethernet, SCSI-2, and super I/O ports. They also allow expansion with PMC or IndustryPack mezzanine cards. Although the 2600 is a single-card design, however, the 3600 uses two cards: a processor/memory module and a base module. The 3600's added board space lets it offer floppy-disk and VGA interfaces, video-buffer memory, and as much as 1 Gbyte of error-correcting DRAM. Prices start at $4495 and come with a five-year parts-and-labor warranty.

—by Richard A Quinnell

Motorola Computer Group, Tempe, AZ. (602) 438-3644.