EQware Engineering is marketing a general-purpose Linux-based PCI board with two Motorola G4 PPC processors that can be used as a co-processor card on an active motherboard, or as a blade server in a passive PCI backplane. The G4Card targets scientific and medical research, high-speed datacomm, or sophisticated signal acquisition and signal processing applications.

(Click for larger view of G4Card)

The G4Card supports 64 or 32 bit PCI slots, and 66 or 33 Mhz operation. It is recognized as a normal PCI device by the motherboard BIOS and operating system, according to EQware's Dennis O'Brien, and is a full size V2.2 PCI compliant card.

According to O'Brien, the card was developed by custom hardware and consulting firm Seitz & Associates, for a customer using it as a high performance, high resolution video codec and motion detection device capable of processing 135 Megapixels per second.

EQware Engineering, an association of embedded design experts, originally handled the BIOS, Linux kernel, and video applications on the G4Card, before getting permission from Seitz & Associates to market the card themselves. “Due to our familiarity with the G4Card, EQware Engineering has been given the rights to market and sell the card,” said O'Brien.

The G4Card utilizes two MPC7455/57 CPUs clocked at 1GHz each. Each chip incorporates four integer engines, one standard floating-point engine, one AltiVec floating-point engine, and three additional AltiVec engines. The AltiVec engines support SIMD (Single Instruction-Multiple Data) for extremely fast FFT (fast Fourier transform) and other DSP (digital signal processing) operations. AltiVec instructions are fully supported by GNU tools, according to EQware. Each G4 processor also comes with 2MB of L3 cache.

The G4Card's two processors share 1Gbtye SDRAM, 64Mbtyes FLASH and two 32/64-bit 33/66-Mhz PCI 2.2-compliant buses, including one standard edge connector and one PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) interface. Other onboard peripherals include three independent 10/100 Ethernet channels; a CompactFlash interface; two multi-protocol serial ports; a two-channel IDE controller; support for programmable timer, watchdog timer, and real-time clock (RTC); temperature monitoring; sophisticated interrupt control; and eight channels of high-speed DMA (direct memory access).

The G4Card boots a PPCBoot PPC BIOS V1.1.5 from onboard Flash memory. The BIOS supports booting the included PPC Linux SMP 2.4.x kernel from Flash memory, as well from network and IDE devices. The included kernel offers “a wide selection of network services and standard PCI devices,” according to EQware, and host support software includes Linux device drivers capable of moving data over the PCI via onboard DMA. Both BIOS and kernel are GNU GPL licensed.

According to EQware, multiple G4Cards can be combined on a single backplane, with each delivering 15GFlops.

G4Cards are priced at $3,000, and available from stock or within four weeks, depending on order size. Additional details can be found on EQware's Website.

 
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