GE single board computer delivers increased performance without additional power consumption

CHARLOTTESVILLE, USA: GE Intelligent Platforms today announced the PPC10A rugged 6U VME single board computer.

Built around the QorIQ P4080 8-core processor from Freescale Semiconductor, it provides a significant increase in performance while operating within the power envelope of its predecessor, the dual core PPC9A (for which it provides a straightforward, cost-effective upgrade) – allowing more throughput per slot.

Alternatively, existing systems that use multiple processor boards can be replaced with a single PPC10A board containing multiple processors, saving space and weight. The PPC10A supports both symmetric- and asymmetric multiprocessing.

The PPC10A features either eight or four e500mc cores, each operating at up to 1.5GHz. Combined with up to 8 GBytes of dual channel DDR3 memory, its performance makes it ideal for the most demanding applications, while five levels of ruggedization enable it to operate in any environment from office/benign to harsh.

It also offers significant flexibility with two XMC/PMC sites and an AFIX (Additional Flexible Interface Extension) site that allows almost any customer application to be accommodated. GE’s AFIX optionally features a range of capabilities including SCSI, VGA/graphics, digital IO, 1553 and Flash drive; customer-specific variants are also possible.

“The VMEbus architecture has been with us for more than thirty years and is at the heart of hundreds of thousands of deployed embedded computing systems, with more being added all the time,” said Richard Kirk, Product Manager at GE Intelligent Platforms.

“The PPC10A will be enormously attractive to existing VMEbus users as they look to increase performance – and it will also be attractive to new users who will be compelled by its combination of high throughput, enormous flexibility and low power consumption.”

In addition to the flexibility offered by its two XMC/PMC sites and AFIX site, the PPC10A also provides two Gigabit Ethernet ports (with an additional two ports optionally available), two Serial ATA ports, two USB 2.0 ports (three additional USB 2.0 ports are optionally available) and 31 GPIO ports.

The PPC10A is supported by a rich and comprehensive software environment, including Deployed Test Software (BIT and BCS): operating system support is planned for VxWorks, Wind River Hypervisor, Linux and INTEGRITY.