Concurrent Technologies announces their latest 6U VPX processor board based on the 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor family (previously codenamed “Haswell”). The VR E1x/msd is a 6U VPX board featuring either the quad-core Intel® Core™ i7-4700EQ processor or the dual core Intel® Core™ i5-4400E processor, together with the associated mobile Intel® QM87 Express chipset. With up to 32 Gbytes of DRAM and a rich assortment of I/O interfaces, this board is an ideal processor board for 6U VPX solutions requiring the latest in processing performance. 6U VPX is particularly well suited to high-end compute intensive applications including command and control, surveillance, radar and image processing systems.
The 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor family is based on 22nm process technology and provides enhanced CPU and graphics performance over previous generations at TDP levels up to 47W. Additionally, new instructions are introduced, including: the Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2.0 (Intel® AVX) to provide a performance improvement in integer and floating-point-intensive computations, particularly appropriate for image processing applications, and the Intel® AES New Instructions (Intel® AES-NI) enhancements to accelerate data encryption and decryption in hardware.
The VR E1x/msd is a 6U VPX processor board featuring this latest quad-core and dual-core processor and supporting chipset, with up to 32Gbytes DDR3L DRAM with ECC. Additional features include 4 x SATA600 mass storage interfaces including an on-board SATA 600 HDD/SSD site, on-board CompactFlash® site, serial, USB, GPIO and GPI interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet ports, graphics and stereo audio interfaces. The wide range of I/O interfaces can be further expanded by the addition of one or two XMC/PMC modules. The board supports a configurable control plane fabric interface (VITA 46.6) and a flexible PCI Express® (PCIe) data plane fabric interface (VITA 46.4) supporting up to Gen 3 data rates and is compatible with several OpenVPX™ profiles.
The VR E1x/msd is I/O compatible with the previous generation VR 737/x8x family and can be used alongside the VR XMC/x01, a 6U VPX Dual XMC/PMC Carrier and Mass Storage Board.
Initially the boards are available as commercial and extended temperature variants, and ruggedized variants will follow in the near future. To ease integration, many of today’s leading operating systems including Windows®, Linux® and VxWorks® are supported. Systems using multiple processing boards will benefit from the optional Fabric Interconnect Networking Software (FIN-S) which provides a high performance, low latency, communications mechanism for multiple host boards to intercommunicate across the high-speed fabric interface.
Glen Fawcett, Managing Director, Concurrent Technologies, commented: “The VR E1x/msd is an important addition to our 6U VPX product family. Existing and new projects can benefit from the enhancements in CPU performance and graphics capabilities as well as security and power efficiency of the 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor used on this board to boost signal- and image-processing performance”.