Products: Pixellexis Systems & Technologies LXGD351SC

Pixellexis Systems & Technologies aimed for the high end when it created its LexiGrid water-cooled parallel-processing solution for realtime rendering. The 2RU device — with some versions boasting 1,300 processors and processing speeds north of 4 tera operations per second (TOPS) — is big iron, developed to sit in an IT center.

Now the Quebec-based company offers a more modest approach with its LXGD351SC; a single-slot PCIe-style card fitted with one of its MPPA chips prices at an introductory $2,000. Yet it boasts 332 processors at 1.2TOPS, which the company claims will deliver the chops to speed JPEG 2000 encoding/decoding cycles to make the DCI format a better fit for post and theatrical delivery shops.

Massive parallel-processor arrays for pixel-level manipulation have come in and out of vogue for use in the motion-picture and video industries over the years, and Teranex's video-processing gear was one recent and successful gambit.

Pixellexis opened offices late last year in Los Angeles to provide sales and after-sales support of the company's LexiGrid product line.