General Micro Systems Ships The First Gigahertz Dual Processor Vmebus And Compactpci Cpu Boards - Product Announcement

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Oct 2, 2000

Based on Intel's new one-Gigahertz Processor, the CompactPCI Atlas-C and VMEbus Atlas-V provides built-in support for symmetric and real-time asymmetric multiprocessing. This enables the board's two processors to work together in parallel on the same program, transparent to the programmer and the application.

Atlas-C and Atlas-V feature a pair of one-GHz Pentium III processors, each equipped with 256 kbytes of n1-wait-state on-die Cache. The two processors also share up to 1 Gbyte of 100-MHz synchronous DRAM main memory. The processors, cache and memory are linked via a 100-MHz local bus, which is an extension of Intel's Front Side Bus (FSB).

Atlas provides the most versatile I/O and networking options of any Pentium based multiprocessor CPU boards. Included are dual 10/100-Mbit/sec Ethernet interfaces (twisted pair), a 40-Mbyte/sec UltraWide SCSI interface, and a 64-bit AGP graphics engine with four Mbytes of video RAM optimized for 3D rendering. Also available are two Ultra-DMA 33 IDE interfaces, a pair of USB ports, dual serial I/O with optional RS422 drivers and a parallel port.

Atlas supports symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing, both of which make it easy to distribute programs across multiple CPUs. Symmetric multiprocessing, which leverages SMP facilities built into Windows NT, Solaris and Linux, is ideal for SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) applications like graphics and imaging because it enables multiple CPUs to work concurrently on the same program thread, symmetric multiprocessing.

Asymmetrical multiprocessing is an innovative form of de-coupled multiprocessing based on GMS' RAMP (Real-time Asymmetric Multi Processing) technology. The RAMP microkernel works hand in hand with RTOSs like VxWorks, enabling a single master processor to coordinate the activities of multiple slave processors, each executing its tasks fairly independently out of shared memory. By enabling multiple CPUs to work concurrently on the same program, but not the same thread, RAMP provides an excellent multiprocessing solution for compute-intensive applications that require deterministic real-time response. RAMP works out of the box with VxWorks, but can be readily adapted for other RTOSs.

Atlas runs a variety of popular desktop and real-time operating systems, including Windows NT, Solaris x86, QNX and VxWorks. Additional software support includes multiprocessing drivers for the Compact PCI and VMEBus backplanes that treat the bus as a TCP/IP network. Atlas also comes equipped with AMI's BIOS and on-board diagnostics software and status LED's.

Pricing for Atlas boards starts at $2,299 less processor and memory and they are available immediately from stock.