"…sequential computers are approaching a fundamental physical
limit on their potential power. Such a limit is the speed of light…"
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The SMT208A module conforms to the published standards of a size 4 TRAM, including all system control signals, 'Reset', 'Error' and 'LinkSpeed'. Subsystem control pins are also supported allowing operation as a system master, increasing flexibility still further.The SMT208A supports a 60MHz TMS320C40 microprocessor, giving a processing module capable of up to 60MFLOPS peak performance. The ease with which compilers can arrange operations to efficiently drive the modified Harvard architecture of the 'C40 ensures there is no requirement for a programmer to resort to assembly level coding, in all but the most critical sections of code. To ensure that the multiply-accumulate unit is not restricted by waiting for data the processor has dual data buses, each offering over 100MBytes/s transfer speeds; both are accessible at the same time.
The transputer links are implemented using C011 link adaptors mapped into the address space of the 'C40 with transfers controlled directly by the CPU or DMA engines. The DMA engines give data transfer rates at full transputer link bandwidth.
Six 'C40 parallel links are made available to the user, offering data transfer rates eight times those of a transputer link and available through external connectors. This allows high-speed communication between multiple SMT208As or a SMT208A and other 'C40 based systems or peripherals. A system using an SMT208A as the low level data processing engine can accept data over two 'C40 links at 40MBytes/s, perform the required operations on this data at up to 60MFLOPS, and pass the results out over the 4 transputer links at 1.2MBytes/s (typical). This level of performance is available directly from a high level language, ensuring that an application can remain flexible to allow for migration to other hardware platforms as they become available.
The SMT208A is supplied with one bank of 4MBytes of EDRAM and two banks of SRAM, one bank of 512 KBytes and one of 1 MByte. Local EPROM initialises the module and boots applications via a transputer link. Stand-alone operation can also be supported by replacing the 'boot code' with application code.
The SMT208A is supported by software from many leading parallel software vendors and includes Assembler, 'C' and FORTRAN compilers.
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