Press Release
16 August 2011
BittWare's Anemone Floating Point Co-Processor for FPGAs Now Available on AA-FMC (VITA-57) Board
Provides true C-programmability and superior power efficiency for enhancing FPGA processing solutions, enabling superior development productivity for rugged and commercial systems
RedLinX, a value-added distributor operating in Sub-Saharan Africa and BittWare, a leading supplier of high-end COTS signal processing solutions for military/aerospace, communications, and instrumentation markets, announced that the breakthrough Anemone™ acceleration technology for FPGAs is ready to ship. BittWare's Anemone chips will first appear on an FMC (VITA 57) 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. RedLinX is now bringing this technology to the South African market.
“The Anemone processor is a paradigm changer on many fronts; one of the most compelling is that it turns co-processing upside down by accelerating an FPGA instead of the other way around,” stated Jeff Milrod, BittWare President & CEO.
The Anemone104 (AN104) falls into the emerging “many core” processor category. Inside each chip are 16 small and elegant RISC processors optimized for floating-point. The key breakthrough is the way these processors are interconnected and also tied directly into an FPGA. The first BittWare product using Anemone is called AA-FMC. The AA-FMC hosts four Anemone104 chips providing a total sustained performance of up to 128 GFLOPS, and meets the industry-standard for the FMC mezzanine form factor. RedLinX is accepting orders now and boards will ship starting at the end of September. Anemone is an implementation of the Epiphany™ architecture from Adapteva, a startup company in which BittWare is an investor.
Says Alastair Knight from RedLinX: “We are excited to be introducing a uniquely new approach to floating-point DSP. Customers will really benefit from being able to develop using standard ANSI-C compilers and find their algorithms optimised for the most efficient performance.”
Anemone104 Overview
The Anemone104 (AN104) is 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.
AA-FMC Features
The AA-FMC consists of four Anemones (AN104) 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 (AMC), VPX (VITA 46/48/65), and PCI Express (PCIe) boards.
Anemone Development System
The Anemone Development System (ANDS) 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.
Adapteva Epiphany Software Development Kit (SDK)
The Adapteva Epiphany SDK is based on standard GNU development tools including an optimizing C complier, simulator, GDB debugger, and Eclipse multi-core IDE. It enables out-of-the-box execution of applications written in regular ANSI-C and does not require any C-subset, language extensions, or SIMD.
Insight™ Libraries for the Epiphany architecture
Insight™, from Paralant, Ltd., is a set of optimized numerical signal processing functions for the Anemone FPGA co-processor. It includes the most commonly used signal processing algorithms: FFTs, FIR filters, matrix multiplication (real and complex), and many others. Each of the Insight libraries is designed to run over the many cores on the Epiphany mesh, whether using a single core, sixteen cores, or more.
Note: All Products are available at RedLinX Embedded Solutions.
About RedLinX™
RedLinX™ is a multifaceted specialist engineering technology company, offering leading edge technologies from embedded to high-performance computing and related products, open-systems and solutions. RedLinX™ operates in the ICT, Telecoms, Transport, Mining, Industrial, Security and Defence market segments throughout South Africa and Africa and is supported by their own locally based support, production and engineering facilities. RedLinX™ has four operating divisions, namely: Embedded Systems Division, Telecoms Systems Division, High Performance Systems Division and the Production & Engineering Systems Division. Operations are located in Cape Town and Midrand.
Media Contact – Alastair Knight, +27 21 526 4160, alastair@redlinx·co·za, http://www.redlinx.co.za
About BittWare, Inc.
For over two decades, BittWare, Inc. has been a leading designer and manufacturer of FPGA computing and hybrid (FPGA and DSP) 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) and XMC. For more information on BittWare and its innovative FPGA and DSP solutions, visit www.bittware.com.
