Quad processors power new DSP board
By Warren Webb -- EDN, April 14, 2005
Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing recently announced the Compact Champ-AV IV, a high-performance CompactPCI DSP board that derives its power from four Freescale (www.freescale.com) MPC7448 PowerPC processors. The board complies with the CompactPCI packet-switching-backplane specification and provides DSP applications with as much as 48 GFLOPS of peak computational power (Picture). Each of the board’s four processing nodes comprises a 1.5-GHz 7448 processor; 256 or 512 Mbytes of DDR-250 SDRAM; dual 100-MHz, 64-bit PCI-X interfaces; and a Gigabit-Ethernet connection. Each node transfers data to adjacent nodes at speeds as high as 1.6 Gbytes/sec. Both PMC sites on the Compact Champ-AV IV support low-voltage differential signaling to the backplane connectors, enabling serial switched interconnections, such as StarLink and FibreChannel.
Operating-system support for the Champ-AV IV includes Wind River VxWorks/Tornado. A Linux package will be available by midyear. The Compact Champ-AV IV is available in a commercial-temperature, air-cooled configuration with prices starting at $14,900.
Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, www.cwcembedded.com.
