General Micro Systems ships the fastest multiprocessor CPU board

Atlas-C provides the most versatile I/O and networking options of any Pentium based multiprocessor CPU board. Included are dual 10/100-Mbit/sec Ethernet interfaces (twisted pair), a 40-Mbyte/sec UltraWide SCSI interface, and a 64-bit AGP graphics engine with four Mbytes of video RAM optimized for 3D rendering. Also available are two Ultra-DMA 33 IDE interfaces, a pair of USB ports, dual serial I/O with optional RS422 drivers and a parallel port.

Atlas-C is the first dual-Coppermine CPU board to support symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing, both of which make it easy to distribute programs across multiple CPUs. Symmetric multiprocessing, which leverages SMP facilities built into Windows NT, Solaris and Linux, is ideal for SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) applications like graphics and imaging because it enables multiple CPUs to work concurrently on the same program thread, symmetric multiprocessing.

Asymmetrical multiprocessing is an innovative form of de-coupled multiprocessing based on GMS' new RAMP (Real-time Asymmetric Multi Processing) technology. The RAMP microkernel works hand in hand with RTOSs like VxWorks, enabling a single master processor to coordinate the activities of multiple slave processors, each executing its tasks fairly independently out of shared memory. By enabling multiple CPUs to work concurrently on the same program, but not the same thread, RAMP provides an excellent multiprocessing solution for compute-intensive applications that require deterministic real-time response. RAMP works out of the box with VxWorks, but can be readily adapted for other RTOSs.

For applications requiring high performance at a reduced cost, Atlas-C is also available with a single 466-MHz Celeron PPG370 processor, scaleable to 500 MHz. The Celeron processor includes 128 Kbytes of on-die cache with a one-to-one clocking, which dramatically improves cache performance.