Technical data

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0. TPU XIO Board Introduction
This document accompanies the SGI Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) XIO board and
contains information about the TPU power requirements, panel plate and LEDs,
software installation, and slot selection requirements for these Silicon Graphics chassis:
• SGI Origin 2000 servers
• SGI 2200, SGI 2400, and SGI 2800 servers
• Silicon Graphics Onyx2 deskside systems
• SGI Origin 200 Gigachannel servers
The TPU is a high-performance, advanced digital signal processor. The TPU functions as
a shared-memory coprocessor that improves time-to-solution for signal and image
processing applications and related algorithms. The TPU is implemented as a Crosstalk
I/O (XIO) board and uses mastered direct memory access to read and write data from
and to the host node memory.
XIO boards are optional products for Silicon Graphics platforms that are based on the
scalable shared-memory multiprocessing (S2MP) architecture. Each active XIO slot
provides up to 1.6 megabytes per second of bidirectional bandwidth (that is, 800
megabytes or 6.4 gigabits in each direction) through a crossbar switch that is located on
the system's midplane. Specific XIO products may use either a portion or all of this
available bandwidth. All of the XIO slots in a system can be active simultaneously. For
more details on how XIO slots fit into the rest of the system, refer to each system’s
installation or owner’s documents.
SGI authorized service providers install TPU XIO boards into the host server, except in
Origin 200 Gigachannel servers, which contain customer installable XIO boards. For
Origin 200 Gigachannel XIO board installation instructions, refer to the Origin 200 and
Origin 200 Gigachannel Maintenance Guide, publication number 007-3709-xxx.