How much memory on PCIe-1430

[CyGa]

Hello,

I was wondering how much embedded memory is present on PCIe-1430 boards. Is data directly transfered from board to host memory or is there  an intermediate FIFO ? If there is a FIFO, what's its depth ?

thanks !

[BenjaminR · Accepted solution]

Hi zyl7,

Thnaks for posting on National Instrumetns forum.

You can find here the memory information  for the PICe-1430.

The memory on these boards doesn't really matter. A little bit of onboard memory might be used by each board, but in almost all cases this onboard memory is useless to the end user, because the boards use DMA to immediately transfer the image data to the computer's RAM. The frame grabber board (due to the PCI Express bus) is able to transfer all of the image data almost immediately to the computer RAM via a DMA transfer, thus removing the need for a large amount of onboard memory. The real limitation with these high-bandwidth frame grabber boards are 32-Bit operating systems (i.e. Windows XP). 32-Bit operating systems restrict the amount of RAM to less than 4 GB, which is approximately only 6.5 seconds of data at the full 680 MBytes/s bandwidth.

[CSD]

I respectfully disagree with the statement that memory on the 1430 doesn't matter.  The 1429, the predecessor to the 1430, had almost no onboard memory (~16kb), and would routinely run into FIFO overflow issues when running multiple computer bus heavy applications, or even a single bus heavy application that wasn't aware of how many memory copies it was doing with image data from the 1429 (i.e. MAX).  The lack of a larger onboard FIFO buffer caused the 1429 to return FIFO overflow errors when any hiccup occured in the system's bus transfer mechanisms.  Benjamin is correct in that you won't need to do anything special to use the 1430's onboard buffer, but, the card wouldn't be worth purchasing if it didn't have some onboard buffering capabilities

For what it is worth, the 1430 has a 512 Mb onboard buffer...And Benjamin is correct, you will definently want to look at a 64 bit OS, 64 bit LabVIEW, and 64 bit Vision Acquisition software.  The 1430 also handles more data than the 1429, 800 Mb/sec vs 680 Mb/sec, and it is cheaper, $2000ish vs $2200ish.

Chris

[BenjaminR]

Hi Chris,

In my post I just wanted to point out that the driver will manage everything for you in term of onboard memory. Off course the onboard memory is important and has to be considered when you choose you board.

[natmojo]

Chris,

There appears to be some confusion on specs and features of the PCIe-1429 and PCIe-1430, so in effort to clear things up, here you go:

Neither the 1429 or the 1430 have what you would consider deep onboard buffers.  The buffers that they do have are contained within the block RAM of the FPGA so they are relatively small (16K Bytes on the PCIe-1429.)

The PCIe-1429 can acquire from an Extended-Full Camera Link Camera at a peak data rate of 850 MB/s (10, 8-bit pixels at Max rate of 85 MHz.)  It has a PCIe Gen1, x4 host interface that is capable of nearly 800 MB/s throughput.  This will work without overflowing in some systems if you are careful, but it is not recommended.

The PCIe-1430 is not a successor to the PCIe-1429 and can acquire from two Camera Link Base cameras at a max throughput of (2, 12-bit pixels at a Max rate of 85 MHz = 192 MB/s each)  Even if the 1430 acquired from two camera simultaneously, the necessary bandwidth to host memory would be less than half of what the PCIe-1429 would require at full rate. This is why there is no need for deep onboard memory on the PCIe-1430.

The successor to the PCIe-1429 is the PCIe-1433 and it has all of the features of the PCIe-1429 AND deep onboard memory of 512 MBytes.  The PCIe-1433 also supports Power over Camera Link (PoCL.)  Additional optimizations have been made to the hardware and software for the PCIe-1433 so as to avoid FIFO overflows.  There may be some corner cases where you will be able to cause a FIFO overflow of the PCIe-1433, but chances are very low.  The PCIe-1433 is a great Frame Grabber and its list price in the US is $1999.

A 64-bit OS and software will not significantly reduce the chance of overflowing a Frame Grabber FIFO over a 32-bit OS.

-Jeff

[CSD]

My mistake, I was thinking of the 1433 when the original poster was asking questions about the 1430.  To many numbers getting jumbled in my head.  Thanks for the clarification.