A parallel pipelined data flow coprocessor
James T. Canning, Richard A. Miner · 1989
A parallel pipelined data flow coprocessor has been developed for the 68000 based Commodore Amiga workstation. The coprocessor, based on Nippon Electric Corporation's mPD7281 Image Pipelined Processor (ImPP), was designed as an algorithm processor for numerically intensive applications such as image processing, image synthesis, and numerical analysis. The coprocessor can accomodate up to seven of the 5-MIPS ImPP's providing over 30 MIPS of processing power to dedicated tasks. The ImPP's act as true coprocessor's providing a multi-processor arrangement consisting of the 68000 and the coprocessor's parallel pipeline. The workstation and parallel processors share all system resources including memory and peripherals. The coprocessor has its own DMA capabilities for transferring program code and data between the workstation and the pipeline. The coprocessor is completely programmable via a development environment running native on the Amiga, including an assembler, a simulator, and a runtime library. Additional programming tools are also being developed.