Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing has announced the first deliveries of its new CHAMP-AV8 and VPX6-490 signal and image processor boards. The CHAMP-AV8, CWCEC’s first rugged, high performance OpenVPX DSP engine based on the new quad-core Intel Core i7-2715QE processor, accelerates SIGINT algorithms with its 256-bit AVX floating point instruction set. The VPX6-490 GPGPU compute engine features dual NVIDIA GPUs based on the NVIDIA Fermi architecture, and the massive compute capability of a pair of 240-core GPU devices. The CHAMP-AV8’s dual processors deliver performance rated at up to 269 GFLOPs. With a 21GB/s (peak) DDR3 memory subsystem connected directly to the processor, the Intel Core i7-2715QE is able to maximize the throughput of its Intel AVX vector processing units and process larger vectors at peak rates significantly greater than was possible with previous AltiVec-based systems.
The CHAMP-AV8 is CWCEC’s first DSP engine to offer IDT's Tsi721 Gen2 PCIe-to- Serial RapidIO protocol conversion bridge, bringing the performance and bandwidth advantages of sRIO switch fabrics to the 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processor-based embedded computing applications. Available in a full range of air- and conduction-cooled configurations, the rugged CHAMP-AV8 combines the significantly improved floating-point performance of the latest Intel Core i7 processors, with the substantial bandwidth and system-enabling features of the 6U OpenVPX form factor. The CHAMP-AV8 incorporates the enhancements of the OpenVPX standard with a complete suite of data plane, expansion plane, and control plane interfaces. Supporting Gen2 SRIO and Gen2 PCIe interfaces, the CHAMP-AV8 offers triple the bandwidth of first generation VPX products with up to 32 GB/s of fabric performance, thus ensuring that application performance can scale commensurately with the much higher CPU performance.
The VPX6-490 GPU Application Accelerator is CWCEC’s first general purpose graphics processing unit- multi-core engine. The VPX6-490 features dual NVIDIA GPUs based on the NVIDIA Fermi architecture, each with 240 CUDA cores. Integrated into a High Performance Embedded Computing subsystem, VPX6-490 functions as a co-processor attached to a host Intel-processor board and takes advantage of the new PCIe Expansion Plane definitions in the VITA 65 OpenVPX standard to provide off the shelf backplane support for high-speed interconnection between pairs of SBC/GPU. The combination of 2nd Generation Intel processors, gen2 PCI Express interconnect and 480 NVIDIA CUDA cores raises the performance bar for embedded High Performance Embedded Computing systems for demanding military DSP applications such as C4ISR, EO/IR, and SatCom.
Designed for high performance computing, the newest generation of NVIDIA processors feature larger internal shared memories, a completely new L2 cache, unified memory addressing and many other enhancements to improve CUDA-based applications performance and improve programmer productivity. The VPX6-490 supports its dual high performance GPU processors with a 2 Gbyte, 256-bit wide, 80 Gbyte/s GDDR5 memory subsystem designed to eliminate data bottlenecks and support large signal processing datasets into the onboard memory. Each GPU device supports a full 16-lane Gen2 PCIe interface to the backplane, supporting the maximum possible bandwidth between host and GPU. The VPX6-490 also supports 8-lane and 4-lane PCIe interfaces.
