Matrox Imaging has introduced two PICMG 1.3 boards for its HPC platform, Matrox Supersight e2. The system host board (SHB-5520) and the x86 accelerator board (XAB-5520) support Intel's latest-generation microarchitecture, Nehalem, through the use of the Intel 5520 chipset.
The Nehalem microarchitecture will bring performance gains to high-throughput machine vision and imaging applications where data volumes continue to increase. Memory directly attached to the CPU offers higher bandwidth as a result of a shorter path, so traditionally I/O-bound operations (such as arithmetic and spatial filters with small kernels) enjoy higher performance. Intel QPI, the basis of a distributed shared memory architecture, improves communication between multiple processors, encouraging parallelism, which translates into performance gains for compute-bound operations like morphology with large kernels as well as I/O-bound operations.
