MARCH 29--Mercury Computer Systems Inc. (Chelmsford, MA; www.mc.com) has announced new levels of performance for its RACE++ Series PowerPC VME and PowerStream systems. Built with Motorola's 500-MHz PowerPC processor with AltiVec technology, a system can be configured to exceed 1.25 TeraFLOPS of processing power.
The new systems maintain the identical form factors of previous systems and are suitable for both commercial applications where dozens of processors are packaged in a single system and military applications where chassis size, weight, and power are key issues. "The 25% faster processor will benefit many signal- and image-processing applications, such as those that use fast convolution and other computationally intensive algorithms," said Richard Jaenicke, director of product marketing at Mercury Computer Systems. "Combined with the lower price per processor, the new 500-MHz PowerPC systems deliver a significant improvement in price-performance capabilities."
The RACE++ Series PowerPC 7410 systems use Motorola "G4" PowerPC MPC7410 processors with AltiVec technology running at 500 MHz. Each processor node also includes 2-Mbyte Level 2 cache, 256-Mbyte synchronous DRAM, and a dedicated interface to the RACE++ switch fabric. The AltiVec unit can operate simultaneously on four floating-point numbers or sixteen 8-bit integers on each clock cycle. The 267-Mbyte/s RACE++ interface connects the processing node to I/O, memory, and other processors. System configurations are available with up to 320 processors providing up to 1.28 TeraFLOPS of computing performance.
