Overview
Linedancer is a software programmable Extreme Processor, which can deliver the performance levels traditionally associated with expensive high-end FPGAs, but at a fraction of the cost.
Based around Aspex’s patented 6th generation ASProCore Associative String Processing array, Linedancer takes advantage of the natural parallelism present in many image and signal processing applications to perform thousands of calculations in parallel.
Unlike traditional DSPs and CPUs, which typically only process up to 8 or 16 data items in parallel, Linedancer contains 4,096 processing elements in a Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) configuration, allowing all 4,096 processors to calculate results in parallel.
Key benefits
- Faster time-to-market
- Lower risk
- Lower development cost
- Scalable price:performance
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Linedancer’s 100% software-programmable model
allows developers to start hardware
development early in the cycle, or avoid custom
hardware development
altogether by using one of Aspex’s standard
Accelera plug-in cards. |
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Unlike cumbersome FPGA design flows, Linedancer’s C-based
development flow allows the developer to compile, run, and
debug within minutes, allowing product development to take
weeks instead of months.
A software based platform allows new features to be added late in the design cycle, or even deployed in the field after products have shipped, leading to significantly reduced risk.
Scalable price:performance
The one-dimensional “String” topology of
ASProCore allows the processing array to be extended
across multiple chips, with an increase in performance
that is close to linear. Neighbouring chips can share
data, and Aspex’s libraries allow the programmer
to write code that is independent of the number of chips
in the system.
Straightforward C-based programming model
Linedancer is programmed in C, with a small number of extensions to support parallel processing.
A Windows or Linux toolchain provides compilation and support
in a PC-based development environment, based around the industry
standard GNU toolset.
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