Parallel Microcomputer
Highly versatile,
this densely
packed parallel
processor exploits
advanced micre
electronic trends.
-
R.
M. Lea
Aspex
Microsystems Ltd.
Brunel University
ssociative String Processor microcomputers provide highly versatile
components for the lowcost implementation of high-performance
,information processing systems. By mapping application data struc-
tures to a string representation and supporting content addressing and
parallel processing,
ASP
achieves both application flexibility and a step-
function improvement in cost-performance figures. This improvement
occurs without the loss of computational efficiency usually suffered by gen-
eral-purpose parallel processors.
The
ASP
architecture offers cost-effective support
of
a particularly wide
range of both numerical and nonnumerical computing applications while
exploiting state-of-the-art microelectronic technology. This technology
achieves processor packing densities that are more usually associated with
memory components. In fact, we designed
ASP
to benefit from the in-
evitable VLSI-to-ULSI-to-WSI (very large, ultra large, and wafer-scale in-
tegration) technological trend, with a fully integrated, simply scalable, and
defect/fault-tolerant processor interconnection strategy.
Here,
I
discuss the architectural philosophy, structural organization,
operational principles, and VLSI/ULSI/WSI implementation of
ASP
and
indicate its cost-performance potential.
ASP
microcomputers have the
potential to achieve cost-performance targets in the range of
100
to
1,OOO
MOPS/$1,000
(million operations per second). This gives
ASPS
an
advantage of two to three orders of magnitude over current parallel
computer architectures.
The
ASP
architecture is based on a fully programmable and reconfigur-
able, homogeneous computational structure emerging from research at
Brunel University and being developed by Aspex Microsystems. of-
fers particularty flexible
(see
the box on “Associative Processing”) support
for structured data processing
as
indicated by the examples in Table
1.
The breadth of this application range indicates a large potential market
for
ASP
within the aerospace, telecommunications, automobile, and
manufacturing industries
as
well
as
the commercial, defense, and research
sectors. It also demonstrates the importance of application flexibility and
architectural extensibility (scaling processing power to match application
requirements)
as
ASP
design requirements.
While
ASP
exploits the opportunities presented by the latest advances in
the VLSI-to-ULSI-to-WSI technological trend, it also makes use of the
continually improving highdensity system assembly techniques (multichip,
10
IEEEMICRO
0272-1732/88/IooM)oIofo1.00
0
1988
IEEE
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