The fine-grained, massively parallel Mitrion Virtual Processor (MVP) is the core of the Mitrion Platform. It runs software written in the Mitrion-C programming language in FPGAs. This completely eliminates the need for the programmer to master hardware design. The Mitrion Virtual Processor has a unique architecture that lets it be adapted to each program it is running in order to maximize performance. The MVP performs thousands of operations simultaneously by allocating multiple computational units for each instruction. Depending on the amount of space available on the FPGA chip, it will duplicate the computational units for the most demanding parts of the algorithm, and thereby adapt the hardware to the specific algorithm that is being run.
Parallelism
The massive parallelism in the MVP comes from the fine-grain nature of the processing elements. In a traditional shared memory machine of cluster, only large chunks of code can be run in parallel. On the MVP every individual operation of the program may be run in parallel, without causing any race-conditions or deadlocks.
Low power consumption
An important feature of the MVP over regular microprocessors is the low power consumption. A typical MVP running in a large FPGA consumed at maximum 25 W, compared to about 100 W for a fast microprocessor. Given a 15 times speedup, and four times lower power consumption, the power consumption will be less than 2 % of a CPU based solution.
Licenses
Mitrionics licenses the Mitrion Virtual Processor on a per FPGA basis. Once a Mitrion Virtual Processor License has been acquired for a FPGA, any Mitrion Virtual Processor can be installed on it.
