The MGAP family of processor arrays

The Micro-Grain Array Processor (MGAP) is a family of massively parallel SIMD arrays of fine grain processing elements powerful enough to perform complex signal and image processing algorithms in real time. The MGAP was also designed to be compact enough to conveniently fit as an add-on board to a standard workstation at a fraction of the development cost of other comparable parallel machines. In this paper we update the status of the MGAP-2 which became operational in October 1996, and present a comparison of the MGAP-1 and the MGAP-2. We also give performance comparisons of the two designs through three popular image/video compression algorithms: the Discrete Cosine Transform, Motion Estimation, and Fractal Compression.