Charlottesville, Va. — GE Intelligent Platforms has introduced a new single board computer (SBC) that offers higher performance without additional power consumption. The PPC10A rugged 6U VME single board computer, built around the QorIQ P4080 8-core processor from Freescale Semiconductor, provides a significant increase in performance while operating within the power envelope of its predecessor, the dual core PPC9A, delivering more throughput per slot.
Existing systems that use multiple processor boards can be replaced with a single PPC10A board containing multiple processors, saving space and weight, according to GE. The PPC10A supports both symmetric and asymmetric multi-processing.
The PPC10A features either eight or four e500mc cores, each operating at up to 1.5 GHz. Combined with up to 8 GBytes of dual-channel DDR3 memory, its performance makes it well-suited for demanding applications, while five levels of ruggedization enable it to operate in any office to harsh environment.
It also offers significant flexibility with two XMC/PMC sites and an Additional Flexible Interface Extension (AFIX) site that allows almost any customer application to be accommodated, said GE. Capabilities include SCSI, VGA/graphics, digital IO, 1553 and Flash drive. Customer-specific variants are available.
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 optionally available) and 31 GPIO ports.
The PPC10A is supported by a comprehensive software environment, including Deployed Test Software (BIT and BCS). Operating system support is planned for VxWorks, Wind River Hypervisor, Linux and INTEGRITY.