Matrox Helios Series Installation And Hardware Reference page 88

88 Chapter 4: Matrox Helios hardware reference
The PA can accept up to four source buffers and output to four destination buffers,
allowing several operations to be performed at once in a single pass (for example,
four images can be averaged in one pass).
The PA supports 1-, 8-, and 16- data types. For point-to-point operations, it also
supports 32-bit data types.
The PA operates at a core frequency of 133 MHz, for a peak processing power of
100 billion operations per second (BOPS). With a peak memory bandwidth of
up to 4.3 Gbytes/sec, the PA can process over 2 billion 8-bit pixels/sec and reduce
the time required by I/O-intensive operations.
Input and output
Instead of randomly accessing data in memory, the PA is programmed to stream
data from one to four rectangular regions of memory (image buffers) and to process
the data with many processing elements (PE) operating in parallel. Once the PA
is programmed with the location of the input and output images, as well as the
operations to be performed, a processing pass is started, and the PA operates
completely autonomously until it has finished.
The PA addresses external memory through the memory controller. This interface
is identical to the other read/write ports of the memory controller, except that one
read and one write request can be sent to the memory controller instead of a single
read or write. The memory controller acts as a slave upon memory access requests
from the PA.
The PA efficiently fetches from memory all rows of image data (from the different
sources) required to process one or more rows of the source images, and stores this
data in the PA's 16 Kbyte input buffer. For very wide images, the PA processes the
images in wide vertical strips.