SAMBA comprises a workstation (with its local disk), a systolic array made out of 128 VLSI full custom processors and a FPGA-Memory interface which fills the gap between a complete hardwired array of processors and a programmable Von Neuman machine.
The array is composed of 32 full-custom identical chips which house each 4 processors, leading to a 128 processor array. The chip has been designed at IRISA and provides a computational power of 40 millions matrix cells per second. Hence, the array is able to reach a peak performance of 1.28 billions matrix cells per second.