This month, the first few sites in France should begin using the VMEAlpha64 CPU board from Aeon Systems Inc, Albuquerque, New Mexico, which includes Digital Equipment Corp’s vaunted Alpha chip, says Patrick Delrue, managing director for Horizon Technologies SA, Aeon’s exclusive distributor in France. The board, which uses an Intel 80960 processor to optimise input-output, is capable of a peak execution of 300 MIPS, according to Aeon and Horizon. It comes in two configurations: 100MHz, delivering 200 MIPS; and 150MHz, delivering 300 MIPS. It’s the fastest board in the world; there are no other processors with such a performance, says Delrue. Digital needed a powerful processor and now they’ve leaped over everyone else in the world. Horizon, which specialises in products and services for the real-time processing market, has done a mailing on the board and got great response, he says. We propose it as a CPU board for these people that need lots of power for simulations. Delrue says Aeon was able to bring the CPU board to market before the arrival of DEC’s own Alpha products because they are very close to Digital engineering; they’re a beta site and they had the prototype Alpha processor. Horizon says Aeon is the third manufacturer in the world to obtain the Alpha processor, after Kubota Corp and Cray Research Inc. The board has a three-tier local memory system: on-chip primary cache, 512Kb of secondary cache and a local memory system that can be configured at 16Mb or 64Mb. Transfer between primary and secondary cache is write through. Secondary cache uses a write-back scheme to local memory, which enables transfers to local memory to be deferred, increasing overall performance. Full 128-bit data paths are used when moving between secondary cache and local memory, enabling a full 32-byte cache line to be moved in only two transfers. The VMEAlpha64 board conforms to revision D of the VMEbus protocol specification, which includes a 64-bit data transfer mode, Horizon says, and it has three on-board communication devices: Ethernet, four serial ports and daughterboard for input-output extension.
