cPCI Single Board Computer with Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors



Press Release - March 13, 2007


(available in all countries except France)

VSYSTEMS presents the release of the latest dual processor 6U CompactPCI® single board computer from Concurrent Technologies – the PP 421/23x which features two 1.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® ULV processors.

The board is ideal for CPU intensive processing applications whereby the four processor cores can access up to 8 Gbytes on board DDR2 ECC dual channel SDRAM, whilst maintaining a single slot solution. This combination of high performance data processing and a range of I/O interfaces ensures that the PP 421/23x has one of the highest specifications available today and is therefore an ideal choice for intensive data processing applications within the telecommunications, defense, security, telemetry, scientific and aerospace markets.

The Intel® E7520 server class chipset and Intel® 6300ESB ICH are used to complement the two Xeon processors to achieve a high performance, yet low power, dual processor dual-core architecture. The E7520 chipset can access up to 8 Gbytes DDR2-400 ECC dual channel SDRAM at up to 6.4 Gbytes/s – the dual channel memory consists of up to 4 Gbytes soldered and up to 4 Gbytes SODIMM.

For I/O flexibility there is a PMC site supporting both front and rear I/O, two SATA150 interfaces, two graphics interfaces, four Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, PICMG® 2.16 (Ethernet switched fabric), PICMG 2.9 (IPMI) and PICMG 2.1 (hot swap). The PP 421/23x can operate as a system controller board or as a satellite board (blade) in a CompactPCI system, along with support for various operating systems.

A wide range of onboard I/O is available to the user: the board supports four 10/100/1000Mps Ethernet interfaces (two front and two rear) and the front panel also supports a USB 2.0, RS 232, analog graphics, keyboard and mouse interfaces. As well as the PMC rear I/O, the rear panel supports three more USB 2.0, two more RS-232, two SATA150, one EIDE, digital graphics, keyboard and mouse interfaces. Other features included are a watchdog timer, LAN boot firmware and options for an onboard 2.5-inch EIDE hard disk drive and/or CompactFlash™ EIDE storage. For applications requiring rear I/O connections a rear transition module is also available.

For ease of integration, the PP 421/23x family of boards support many of today’s leading operating systems, including Linux®, Windows® Server 2003, Windows® 2000, Windows® XP and QNX®. Note: The PP 421/23x gives an even greater improvement in measured performance/watt over a comparable dual CPU single-core Intel® Xeon™ processor board. In independent tests it has been shown that the 1.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® ULV processor (667MHz FSB) can provide a greater than 1.9x performance gain, compared to the single-core 2.8 GHz LV Intel® Xeon® processor (800MHz FSB). Plus, due to lower thermal dissipation, the 1.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon ULV processor can deliver a 7.1x improvement in performance/watt, compared to the single-core LV Intel Xeon processor 2.8 GHz.


Click here to view the press release in German or the datasheet. Please contact VSYSTEMS for availability and further information.