A desk-top simulation workstation designed around the DSP96002

The author described a way to dramatically increase the speed of a popular desk top computer, the Apple Macintosh II, so that it becomes an effective and inexpensive simulation workstation. The design is based on the use of concurrent high-speed floating-point microprocessor chips on boards that plug into the NuBus card slots of the Macintosh II. The MPU chosen for the implementation is the Motorola DSP96002, a very high speed 32-bit microprocessor with on-chip floating-point hardware. The 40.5 Mflops (million floating-point operations per second) peak performance of the DSP96002 makes it well suited for simulation applications. Each board contains two DSP96002 processor nodes, an interface to the NuBus of the Macintosh II, and an interface to a proprietary high-speed data bus for connection to other DSP96002 boards. From one to five boards can be used in a system, resulting in a maximum of ten nodes for the simulator. A fully expanded workstation has a maximum sustained rate of 400 Mflops, which approaches the speed of a supercomputer.<>