In any case, we'd say the Supersight e2 is the most powerful Windows Embedded system we've ever written about. The system has a massive chassis (below) that contains a fourteen-slot backplane, capable of accepting up to four PICMG 1.3 SHBs and up to ten PCI Express 2.0 x16 cards (each supplied with 75 Watts of power), according to Matrox.

Matrox's Supersight e2
(Click to enlarge)

Equipped with four power supplies totaling 2040 Watts and multiple fans, the rackmountable Supersight e2 measures 19.5 x 19 x 7 inches. It has four bays for hot-swappable, 2.5-inch hard disk drives, four front-accessible USB 2.0 ports, and two internal USB 2.0 ports (one intended for a licensing dongle, required to run Matrox Imaging Library software), the company says.

Matrox's SHB-2250
(Click either image to enlarge)

As noted, the box can hold from one to four of Matrox's Supersight SHB-5520 devices (pictured above left, with block diagram at right). Using the Intel 5520 and ICH10R chipset, these boards each accept single or dual processors:

• either the Intel Xeon E5645 clocked at 2.4GHz, with six cores, twelve threads, and an 80-Watt TDP
• or the Xeon E5630 clocked at 2.4GHz, with four cores, eight threads, and an 80-Watt TDP

According to Matrox, the SHB-5520 boards can each accept up to 48GB of DDR3 RAM via six 204-pin DIMM sockets. They further include seven SATA/300 interfaces (two via the PICMG 1.3 bus, three via onboard ports), dual gigabit Ethernet ports, six USB 2.0 ports (four on the bus, two with Type A ports), and Matrox G220e graphics controllers connected to a VGA port, the company says.

An internal view of some possible Supersight e2 configurations
(Click to enlarge)

That's merely the beginning, because the Supersight e2's backplane can also accept multiple image acquisition boards (including Camera Link, DVI-D, GigE Vision, IEEE 1394 IIDC, SDI, RS-422/LVDS, as well as standard and nonstandardanalog) and the Matrox Radient eCL, a frame grabber whose operations are assisted by an onboard Altera Stratix III/IV FPGA (field programmable gate array). The system also hosts up to six double-wide or up to nine single-wide GPUs (graphics processor units), Matrox adds.

ATi's FirePro V7800

According to Matrox, the Supersight e2 is now available with the AMD/ATI FirePro V7800 (above) or AMD/ATI FirePro V8800, each providing up to 1600 stream processors and 147.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The V7800 supports up to three independent displays, using the two DisplayPort connectors and one dual-link DVI connector, while the V8800 supports up to four independent displays via DisplayPort connectors, according to AMD.

Janet Matsuda, general manager for AMD Professional Graphics, stated, "AMD and Matrox Imaging have worked closely to ensure seamless integration of ATI FirePro graphics accelerators into the Matrox Supersight e2 platform. [They deliver] ... outstanding compute density for this platform to leverage."

Michael Chee, a product manager for Matrox Imaging, stated, "The Matrox Supersight e2 ... provides the architecture and computational power needed to greatly accelerate the data-parallel operations commonly employed in high-throughput machine vision and medical imaging applications. In addition, many of these GPU-optimized operations are already available through our Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) software development kit."

Further information

According to Matrox, the Supersight e2, SHB-5220 boards, and ATI FirePro graphics cards are all available now. More information may be found on the Supersight e2 product page.

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