Texas Memory Systems delivers high-performance DSP hardware and high-performance DSP software. In classical computer marketing all computer manufacturer’s touted the speed of their hardware. Now as hardware gets incredibly f ast the marketing emphasis is put on achieving this speed in real world applications. This usable performance is directly related to the hardware-software interface efficiency.
Despite four generations of TMS DSP products that have raised the performance bar by a cumulative factor of 600, TMS has maintained a uniform architecture for the user. This compatibility has allowed the user to reuse legacy code on next generation TMS hardware. Next generation TMS DSP hardware is designed with current generation software in mind. No hardware can be sold without efficient software and an efficient hardware/software interface. TMS has always delivered high-performance hardware that has efficient, usable, and compatible software.
The TMS XP-100 PCIe Accelerator card is based on the TM-100 DSP chip that is about 12x faster than the TM-44 chip. The TM-100 is rated at 100-GFLOPS (50-GB/s); TMS projects TM-100 power requirements to be about 25-watts. The chip will operate at 333 MHz with a dual core design. Each core is programmed independently with separate data memories. The XP-100 will be 6x faster than the XP-30/35 while maintaining compatibility with existing applications.
At TMS, we provide the total solution. While our DSP hardware is ranked at the top of the high-performance list, our included DSP software has been well received because it is powerful and easy to use. The XP-100 comes with a mature DSP math library and many valuable software development tools to make programming the XP-100 faster and easier.
The TMS DSP software suite has been designed to operate as a stand-alone application development environment, or to integrate into the XMIDAS application environment (via VPX). The stand-alone environment offers features that are unsupported by XMIDAS. One such feature is dynamic configurability, allowing application changes without requiring a full restart. This stand-alone environment has been optimized for latency and throughput, allowing the final operator to scrutinize signals-of-interest or run full speed analysis of vast amounts of data.
The XP-100 is a single board DSP accelerator card that plugs into a PCIe (x16) slot. DSP number crunching power is provided by the TM-100 ASIC chip. The TM100 has two cores, each with its own local RAM. Its Harvard architecture and VLIW makes the TM-100 a very efficient processor, even with 320 floating-point units to control. Also, special hardware units are included for FFT twiddle-generation, and CORDIC Elementary Function Units are included for quick transcendental math.
 TM-100 program memory is internal to the TM-100 ASIC, while data is stored in external, tightly coupled local RAM. With a larger local RAM than is usually available on other DSP chips, data can be processed in larger blocks with more complex algorithms. Complementing local RAM is global RAM, which is connected to the XPcontroller. Global RAM is a staging area for data streams passing between the PCIe bus and the local RAM.
The XP-100 DSP card has extremely fast busses to prevent data starvation at the TM-100 chip. The TM-100 chip has a front-side I/O bus that connects to the XP controller. In addition, the TM100 chip has a direct and fast connection to its own local RAM. Each core's local RAM can be loaded quickly (5-GB/s) from global RAM while the other core is still running.
|
