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  New Products  BittWare Introduces Anemone: The Floating Point Co-Processor for FPGAs
New Products

BittWare Introduces Anemone: The Floating Point Co-Processor for FPGAs

BittWareBittWare—May 2, 20110
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SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA – May 3, 2011 – BittWare announced today, at the Embedded Systems Conference, the Anemone floating point co-processor chip for use with Altera’s high performance FPGAs. OEM’d from Adapteva’s new Epiphany architecture, BittWare’s Anemone chip is a scalable, true C-programmable, floating point engine that enables novel solutions for complex and evolving signal processing applications. Because it was specifically architected to be used alongside an FPGA as a co-processor, the Anemone simultaneously achieves superior power efficiency and processing performance. Each Anemone features 16 processors, providing 32 GFLOPS of floating point processing while consuming only 2 Watts of total chip power. Multiple Anemones can be gluelessly connected, thereby scaling to create compute blocks of up to 4096 processors providing 8 TFLOPs of floating point performance. Delivering a standard processor software development environment that tightly integrates with a world-class FPGA platform from Altera, the Anemone allows the best of two worlds to be combined – facilitating increased productivity and optimal solutions for complex signal processing applications.

Availability will be via the soon to be announced Anemone product family of COTS boards which combine this new technology with Altera’s high-density Stratix family of FPGAs, and will include a variety of form factors such as FMC (VITA 57), AdvancedMC (AMC), VPX (VITA 46/48/65), and PCI Express (PCIe) slot card.

“It seems like our industry has not demonstrated much creativity in the past few years, and processing improvements have only come at the expense of increasingly ridiculous power consumption, which has in turn created burdensome cooling problems,” stated Jeff Milrod, BittWare President & CEO. “We believe that Adapteva’s Epiphany architecture represents a flash of brilliance that reintroduces some much needed creativity into the embedded signal processing world. The resulting Anemone chip, combined with Altera’s family of FPGAs, creates an insanely cool solution for complex signal processing tasks that can be optimized for power, performance, and productivity.”

“This joint C and RTL solution of Anemone plus Altera FPGAs provides users with the unique ability to partition algorithms into hardware or software, enabling them to design a thoroughly optimized system solution with superior development productivity and unmatched system size, weight, and power,” said David Gamba, director of Altera’s military business unit. “BittWare is once again providing our COTS customers with an incredibly powerful solution for their signal processing applications.”

A New Approach to Floating Point DSP

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Anemone was architected specifically for complex signal processing rather than for I/O, protocol processing, memory interfacing, or special functions, thus creating an extremely efficient chip compared to traditional floating point DSPs that may use only 5% of the silicon area for processing. This has translated into a completely scalable 1 GHz multicore processor with 16 ‘eCore’ processors that provide a total sustained performance of 32 GFLOPS while consuming only 2 Watts of total chip power. Each eCore processor features a compact, general-purpose instruction set that requires no instruction level parallelism and provides high program efficiency. All floating point computations are performed as single-precision IEEE 754; hardware looping is also supported. Anemone offers distributed and segmented memory, and large uniform register files. On-chip distributed shared memory is 4 Mb (32 KByte per eCore) with 32 GBytes/sec of sustained memory bandwidth within each eCore. The cache-less shared memory architecture is extended off-chip, and between chips, via external I/O links.

The Anemone features an internal high-throughput mesh network, with separate data paths for on-chip and off-chip communications. Each eCore processor has a multi-channel DMA engine to support background data movement over the ‘eMesh’. Total on-chip, inter-core bandwidth is 128 GBytes/sec full duplex, with an additional 8 GBytes/sec of off-chip bandwidth. Each router node can simultaneously sustain full-duplex transfers on all ports, with automatic routing based on global addressing.

I/O via Memory-mapped High-speed Links

The Anemone provides a flexible low-overhead external interconnect scheme that supports memory-mapped direct connection of multiple Anemones and is compatible with any LVDS capable FPGA. This is achieved via 4 Links that are full-duplex 8-bit LVDS data ports @ 500 MHz DDR, each simultaneously providing 1 GByte/sec in each direction for a total off-chip bandwidth of 8 GBytes/sec. Its FPGA co-processor use model provides the ultimate flexibility: since all external I/O goes through an FPGA, system designers can customize the I/O to their application³ specific requirements.

ANSI C-programmable, Standard GNU Development Tools

The Anemone reduces system development cost by enabling out-of-the-box execution of applications written in regular ANSI-C. It does not require any C-subset, language extensions, or SIMD. Standard GNU development tools are supported including an optimizing C complier, simulator, GDB debugger, and Eclipse multi-core IDE.

Availability

The Anemone will be available from BittWare on standard COTS boards, including FMC (VITA 57), AdvancedMC (AMC), VPX (VITA 46/48/65), and PCI Express (PCIe) slot cards starting in Q3. Development boards, software and systems will also be available.

About BittWare, Inc.

For over two decades, BittWare, Inc. has been a leading designer and manufacturer of FPGA computing and hybrid (FPGA and DSP) COTS board-level solutions based on Altera’s FPGAs and industry leading DSP technology. The company provides the essential building blocks required by OEMs for developing and deploying their innovative systems in defense, communications, instrumentation, and life sciences applications. BittWare’s product offering addresses OEM needs from prototype-to-production and span a variety of platforms, including VPX, VXS, AMC, CompactPCI, FMC (VITA 57), XMC, and PCIe. For more information on BittWare and its innovative FPGA and DSP solutions, visit www.bittware.com.

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