3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7 combines with Serial RapidIO® on AMC boards

Concurrent Technologies at Embedded World Germany, Nuremberg. Concurrent Technologies released and demonstrated the latest additions to their MicroTCA™ product family – the latest AMC processor boards featuring either dual or quad core 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7 processors based on 22nm process technology combined with IDT’s Tsi721 PCIe to RapidIO bridge to provide a highly efficient interface to a Serial RapidIO® (SRIO) backplane. Additionally, support for SRIO has been added to the previously released Fabric Interconnect Networking Software (FIN-S), which provides standardized uniform APIs across a fabric interconnect. The result is a high bandwidth and low latency solution which utilizes about 5% of the CPU’s bandwidth and provides a realistic opportunity for users of PowerPC®/SRIO products to transfer to Intel® processor technology. Applications for this hardware and software solution are expected within both the telecoms and defence markets, especially where a large number of computing nodes are required to intercommunicate at high data rates.

Depending upon I/O requirement, system designers have a choice of two high performance processor boards – the AM 93x/x1x or the AM 94x/x1x. Users can take advantage of the boards’ processing power, high performance backplane fabric connectivity and the peer-to-peer networking performance of SRIO to develop large multiprocessing systems. These processor boards are particularly well suited for MicroTCA™ based telecommunications applications such as IPTV, digital media servers, media gateways, broadband, Long Term Evolution (LTE) or LTE-Advanced, wireless base stations as well as in test systems for wireline and wireless networks.

All variants of AM 93x/x1x and AM 94x/x1x support Fabric Interconnect Networking Software (FIN-S) which provides high performance Ethernet emulation over SRIO along with other application level interfaces. FIN-S enables plug and play of any TCP/IP based application across the SRIO fabric so reducing the development effort and time to market for the user by providing a very high degree of application portability and reusability. The main features and benefits of using FIN-S on SRIO include:

  • more than 60% practical application level bandwidth when compared to 10 GigE
  • more than double the performance with half the CPU utilization compared to open source SRIO Ethernet emulation solutions
  • TCP/IP Application level bandwidth of more than 1.8 Gbytes/sec achieved with Gen 2 SRIO 5 Gbaud/sec x4 links
  • “jitterless” TCP/IP packet latencies of less than 10 micro seconds

Glen Fawcett, Managing Director, Concurrent Technologies, commented: “By using the IDT bridge technology, we are able to provide one of the first Intel® processor based AMC boards with a Serial RapidIO® interface and associated real time capabilities. The availability of our Interconnect Networking Software is offering a high performance solution, while leaving over 95% of the processor load available for the customer’s application.”