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Dual-Core Performance on COM Express
With the arrival of dual-core Intel® processors embedded systems designers now have the necessary computing horsepower available at attractive price points to address performance hungry applications, such as imaging, gaming and test & measurement systems. RadiSys unleashes the true potential of multi-core computing with the Procelerant CE945GM that combines the Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processors with dual channel memory.
With the arrival of dual core Intel® processors, embedded systems designers now have the necessary horsepower available at attractive price points to address performance hungry applications, such as imaging, gaming and test and measurement systems. COM (Computer-on- module) Express is ideal for these embedded systems that require a compact form factor. RadiSys Procelerant™ CE945GM combines Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor with dual—channel memory-an industry first.
In dual-channel memory configurations, the Intel Core 2 Duo processor can improve performance by more than 50% for general purpose computing tasks and nearly 30% for imaging, graphics-processing and data-acquisition applications. Those gains couldn’t come at a better time for embedded systems designers, who need ways to meet the requirements of today’s performance-hungry applications such as imaging, gaming and test and measurement.
The Intel® Core™ Duo processor architecture is ideal for computing-intensive applications because it provides not only two processing cores, but also is carefully architected to take optimal advantage of the two cores. For example, Intel Core 2 Duo processor features the Intel® Core™ microarchitecture, which uses a combination of cache management, pipelining and parallelism to ensure that the processor achieves its maximum potential.
Simultaneous reads are particularly important for SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) operations, where the same operation is performed on very large sets of operand pairs.
Simultaneous read-write accesses speed up overall graphics performance by allowing faster access to CPU data by the graphics processor through the memory subsystem. These operations are very common in DSP (digital signal processing) and graphics-rendering operations, which rely heavily on linear algebraic operations such as inner products and matrix-matrix or matrix-vector multiplications.
However, historically it’s been extremely difficult or impossible to squeeze two SODIMM (Small Outline Dual In-line Memory Module) sockets on the 95 x 125mm board used in COM Express products. The RadiSys Procelerant CE945GM is the industry’s first COM Express module that combines Intel® Core 2 Duo processor with dual-channel memory. The CE945GM features 2GB DDR2 667MHz SODIMM memory per channel, for a total of 4 GB (view data sheet).
Dual-channel memory unleashes those architectural advantages by providing the ample available memory bandwidth necessary to keep both cores from idling. Dual-channel memory also increases memory-access performance by allowing simultaneous read and write, as well as two simultaneous reads or writes. Both reduce memory-access congestion and in turn reduce idle CPU cycles.