Military Embedded Systems

Increased performance without all that nasty power

Product

March 29, 2011

Alice Moss

Military Embedded Systems

Chris A. Ciufo

General Micro Systems, Inc.

Increased performance without all that nasty power

Remember when Motorola/Freescale rocked our military worlds with the PowerPC and AltiVec? Yeah, we kinda remember that, too.

Remember when Motorola/Freescale rocked our military worlds with the PowerPC and AltiVec? Yeah, we kinda remember that, too. But it’s been a while and we’re anxiously awaiting the revival of AltiVec back into the QorIQ family of Freescale processors. So here’s our prediction: GE’s 6U VME PPC10A, which was announced late last year and profiled herein, will soon be equipped with whichever Freescale CPU includes an AltiVec. Meanwhile, GE’s PPC10A with QorIQ P4080 has a rockin’ 8-core CPU yet still drinks no more power than the predecessor board called the PPC9A (which used Freescale’s 2-core 8641D). So that’s 6 extra cores in the same power budget … and soon an AltiVec. (We hope.) Too cool! The PPC10A’s cores zip along at 1.5 GHz and chat with up to 8 GB of dual-channel DDR3. There are 2 GbE ports (with 2 more as options), 2 SATA, 2 USB (with 3 more as options), and 21 GPIO ports. Two XMC/PMC sites promise even more add-on I/O or processing, and GE’s AFIX expansion site allows customization with SCSI, VGA, 1553, a flash drive, and an AltiVec. Just kidding about that last one, at least until Freescale reintroduces a QorIQ with AltiVec. And since this is GE Intelligent Platforms, there are six ruggedization levels, including conduction-cooled flavors. Even though VPX is all the rage, lots of DoD programs have VME backplanes, and the PPC10A is the top shelf for VME-based Freescale SBCs.

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