pkoehnko@salyko.doit.sub.org (Peter Koehnkow) (10/10/90)
Top-of-the-Line i860-Based 64-bit Parallel Processor Offers 120 MIPS Just on time for the CEBIT '90, DSM Computersysteme of Munich, West Germany, presents the SPC-860, a PC add-on board with unprecedented computing power. Designed and implemented on the basis of the new Intel microprocessor i860, it offers 80 Mega Flops (!) with single or 60 Mega Flops with double precision. Up to 256 SPC-860 boards can be configured, giving a maximum performance of up to 20 Giga FLOPS. The SPC 860 board costs only a fraction of the investment for a supercomputer to get a computer system with equivalent computing power. The board uses a modular, scalable design. Its heart is the new microprocessor i860 from Intel, a 64-bit CPU of the RISC generation. The SPC-860 board can be used in any commercial personal computer and can be addressed as a parallel processor under the MS-DOS, UNIX or OS/2 operating systems. Every SPC-860 board has four transputer links and a high-speed dual port RAM. The memory contents can be transferred through a flat cable with 4,5 Mbytes/sec. The transputer links allow the implementation of cube structures, while the parallel link is designed for a ring structure. For driving a physically distributed system, the SPC 860-boards can be booted via the PC bus or the transputer links as required. Another dual port RAM controls the communication with the PC. It can be enabled, disabled or displaced by means of a control register in the PC address space. In addition, a broadcast window is available for fast simultaneous data transfer to several SPC-860 boards. The dual port RAM (AD63310) also contains semaphore registers which help reduce the overhead in a multi-processor environment. The component allows the PC to generate an interrupt with the i860, and vice versa. The board is supplied with an i860 cross-assembler which runs under MS-DOS. In addition, a comprehensive package of programming examples is provided which makes programming of the board easy. The examples are written in various programming languages, since basically any programming language can be used on the PC side, as long as it allows access to memory and to I/O. Also supplied are the complete sources of the utilities (e.g. loader, debugger, etc.). This makes small modifications easy. The purchase price further includes the source of the SPC-860's boot EPROM. The supplied comprehensive manual even includes the board's circuit diagrams. Get more information from DSM Computer Systems Landwehrstrasse 37 D-8000 Munich 2 West Germany Tel.: (089)55195-0 Fax: (089)598261 Benchmark-Tests SPC-860 board ============================= Dhrystone 1.1 for Integer performance ------------------------------------- Dhry's Rel. System /sec 89552 47.5 i860 uP 40 MHz SPC-860 board -------------------------------------------- Whetstone for floating point performance ---------------------------------------- DP SP System (kwips) (kwips) 24537 30800 i860 uP 40 MHz SPC-860 board -------------------------------------------- Benchmarks have been cut for shorter transmission!