Curtiss-Wright to enhance OpenVPX multiprocessing DSP engine

ASHBURN, USA: Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions (CWCDS), a business group of Curtiss-Wright Controls, has announced that it will enhance its industry-leading dual-processor CHAMP-AV8 rugged, high performance OpenVPX DSP (digital signal processing) engine by upgrading the card with the new Intel Core i7-3612QE processor.

Use of the newly announced Intel Core i7-3612QE is expected to deliver a 50 percent improvement in Power/Watt performance (at elevated temperatures) over the 2nd generation Intel Core i7-2715QE processor, a significant advantage for multi-processor DSP processing in embedded deployed SWaP-constrained military platforms.

The enhanced CHAMP-AV8 also supports IDT's upcoming Gen2 PCIe-to-sRIO protocol conversion bridging semiconductor product, bringing the performance and bandwidth advantages of Serial RapidIO (SRIO) switch fabrics to the 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processor-based embedded computing applications.

"The combination of four cores and doubling of floating point performance provided by the new Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX) instruction set is very exciting for our signal processing customers," said Lynn Bamford, senior VP and GM of Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions. "With Intel's commitment to long life-cycle supply, these new processors will power a new generation of higher performance and power efficient radar and signal intelligence systems."

Available in a full range of air- and conduction-cooled configurations, the rugged CHAMP-AV8 combines the significantly improved floating-point performance of the Intel Core i7-3612QE processor with the substantial bandwidth and system-enabling features of the 6U OpenVPX form factor. The board's pair of quad-core processors feature new Intel AVX floating-point instructions, and delivers unmatched performance, rated at up to 269 GFLOPS.

Supporting the DSP engine's floating-point performance is a 21GB/s (peak) DDR3 memory sub-system that provides ample bandwidth to simultaneously serve CPU access and streaming I/O from its SRIO and PCIe interfaces.

The CHAMP-AV8 incorporates the enhancements of the OpenVPX (VITA 65) standard with a complete suite of data plane, expansion plane, and control plane interfaces.

Supporting Gen2 SRIO and Gen2 PCIe interfaces, the CHAMP-AV8 offers triple the bandwidth of first generation VPX products with up to 32 GB/s of fabric performance, thus ensuring that application performance can scale commensurately with the much higher CPU performance.

The CHAMP-AV8 is the multi-processing component of Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solution's High-Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) solution set that also includes Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA processing, FMC and XMC signal acquisition, SRIO switches, buffer memory and single board computers (SBC).