Dolphin Scientific Inc, Long Beach, California has harnessed the AT&T’s DSP32C signal processor chip to create the DSP450 Desktop Signal Processor, a multi-purpose supercomputer delivering 450 MFLOPS when hosted by an Apple Macintosh II or AT-alike as host. The DSP450 packs in 18 DSP32C chips, each on its own 1.0 Gbps bus so that the thing can sustain a total system throughput rate of 1.6 G-bytes per second. It is pitched at a wide range of applications such as input-output-intensive robotics, control and monitoring and speech and other sound processing and compute-intensive applications such as meteorology, biochemical analysis and scientific simulation. It costs $60,000 and includes a complete development package with AT&T C for coding or trans-ferring existing code and a library of maths, matrix, filter and Fast Fourier Transform functions to reduce development time. The Dolphin DsiView package, included, contains a library of subroutines that enable viewing and processing of external signals through the input-output ports. It also contains a window interface that enables users to down-load programs, run applications and retrieve results from specific DSP32C processors. The DSP450 is one of 16 Dolphin Scientific signal processors that use the AT&T chip. A five-slot enclosure enables configurations with up to 40 analogue channels, four 32-bit digital ports, four serial ports and four RS-232 ports. Future interfaces will include Macintosh SE/30, Sun-3, Sun-4, Sun Sparcstation, IBM PS/2 and DEC Q-Bus. Prices for the DSP450 start at $12,500 for the DSP25 with one DSP32C processor and 10 analogue channels.
