NEW VISION PROCESSOR BOARD FEATURES THE MOTOROLA POWERPC G4 MICROPROCESSOR WITH ALTIVEC TECHNOLOGY
03 October 2000 - Matrox VITE

Introduced this month at the AIA Vision Show West 2000 in San Jose, California, Matrox Imaging's GenesisPlus vision processor board delivers impressive computing power and memory bandwidth of up to 1 gigabyte/sec. The Motorola G4 PowerPC microprocessor with AltiVec technology, running at 400-500 MHz - is the driving force behind this latest addition to the award-winning Matrox Genesis family of scalable vision processors.

"We chose to incorporate Motorola's G4 because it combines the best features of general-purpose computing and signal processing to provide top performance at a given clock rate," says Pierantonio Boriero, Product Line Manager for Matrox Imaging. "Furthermore, it is backed by Motorola's solid migration path for increased performance, all the while maintaining code compatibility."

The G4 PowerPC processor combines a powerful 32-bit superscalar RISC core with the AltiVec technology, a 128-bit vector execution unit, and works in conjunction with the Matrox-designed NOA coprocessor. The NOA is used for accelerating neighborhood operations including convolutions and binary/gray-scale morphology, and delivers 6.4 billion operations per second, running at 50 MHz.
"AltiVec technology is specifically designed to meet the heavy computational requirements of video and image processing applications such as semiconductor wafer inspection, continuous web inspection and 'live' digital x-ray," says Kalpesh Gala, Motorola's AltiVec Technology Product Manager. "It is a high-performance vector engine that processes, in parallel, up to 16 pixels per cycle, and delivers a peak processing power of 6400 MMACs per second when running at 400 MHz."

The GenesisPlus is a full-size PCI board with one or two processing nodes that easily integrates into an existing Matrox Genesis image processing system for dedicated, real-time image capture, processing and display. It can also be used as a powerful stand-alone processing board. The software environment consists of Matrox Imaging Library/ActiveMIL, Matrox Genesis Native Library and Matrox Genesis Developer's Toolkit. Custom code development for the PowerPC processor is done entirely in C/C++ including optimizations for AltiVec technology, with no exotic assembly code required. The GenesisPlus supports Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 and QNX 4.

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