Re: Opteron HT coprocessors


Thomas Womack wrote:
In article <445bc5dd$0$490$cc7c7865@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<pbdelete@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
things now bringing high end commodity CPUs (as opposed to specialist DSP
hardware) and FPGAs close together - offerings from Cray, SGI, this new
opteron socketed thingie etc. Most of the fuss is around their use in
reconfigurable computing so the offerings tend to be lacking for raw
serial IO...

: Whats you acquisition area?

Starlight - astronomical adaptive optics. Potentially you can be talking
about multiple CCDs of many thosands of pixels framing at over 1KHz...

CCD -> Hyperthread -> FPGA -> Hyperthread .. other cpu(s).

I'm not sure that a hypertransport-attached CCD is very practical: HT
is a short-range interconnect, and I suspect it's fast enough that
you'd have great difficulty implementing it in the rather peculiar fab
processes required to make a CCD.

I can't find a data*** for a modern CCD, but the obsolete TC237
has only twelve pins, requires rather complicated digital waveforms
on five of them, and outputs analogue pixel data on two more; you
want to keep the ADC as close to the detector as possible, I'd have
thought connecting the ADCs via an FPGA to gigabit-ethernet channels
would be a reasonable way to go, leaving the problem of data
acquisition from lots of gigabit ethernet connectors as one already
solved by the WAN people.

Tom

One fast image sensor project I bumped into that was not an end user
camera, was based on a cmos sensor, not that I have ever been impressed
with cmos web or picture cameras. In that design I was told of a 4k x
4k sensor with 1KHz or so frame rates with multi stacking of cm size
chips, the processing logic was in pixel blocks in a second layer. If
the A/D conversion could have been done in pixel tiles parallel style,
I am sure one could have put HT on it too (for bottomless $ budget). HT
only makes sense in an interactive compute situation, not a
input/output only one.

The serial data rate would have been quite fast but as you say, better
to use standard gig networking that you can use plug n play to any
workstation.

John Jakson

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