BittWare announces that its Anemone acceleration technology for FPGAs is ready to ship. BittWare's Anemone chips will first appear on an FMC mezzanine card that attaches to BittWare's existing line of Altera-based FPGA COTS boards. Anemone offloads C language processing from an FPGA, helping customers finish projects sooner, at lower risk, while consuming less power.
The Anemone104 is a completely scalable 'many core' processor with 16 eCores that run at rates up to 1 GHz, providing a total sustained performance of 32 GFLOPS while consuming only 2 Watts of total power. On-chip distributed shared memory is 4 Mbit (32 KByte per eCore) with 32 GBytes/sec of sustained memory bandwidth within each eCore. The AN104 features an internal high-throughput inter-core mesh network, with separate data paths for on-chip and off-chip communications. Total on-chip, inter-core bandwidth is 128 GBytes/sec full duplex, with an additional 8 GBytes/sec of off-chip bandwidth. The cache-less shared memory architecture is extended off-chip via four low-overhead external I/O links that support memory-mapped direct connection of multiple AN104s and is compatible with any LVDS capable FPGA.
The AA-FMC consists of four Anemones which are arranged in a 2D mesh, providing 64 eCores that yield up to 128 GFLOPS. All cores have direct memory mapped access to each other via the shared memory architecture and eMesh network. Link ports from two of the processors go to the FMC interface for direct connection to the host FPGA, which provides external memory interfacing and I/O connectivity. The AA-FMC is compliant with the VITA-57 (FMC) specification, and therefore is compatible with BittWare's Altera Stratix family of AdvancedMC, VPX (VITA 46/48/65), and PCI Express boards.
The Anemone Development System includes one or more AAFMs assembled on BittWare VPX or AMC carrier boards featuring the Altera Stratix family of FPGAs, and a VPX or AMC system, complete with host computers if desired. The development system also includes all necessary development tools: the BittWorks II Toolkit for the BittWare hardware, the Epiphany SDK for the Anemone processor, BittWare's ATLANTiS FrameWork for the Altera FPGAs, and the Insight Libraries from Paralant so that a customer can quickly and easily be developing full system-level applications.
