Increased performance without all that nasty power
ProductMarch 29, 2011
Alice Moss
Military Embedded Systems
Chris A. Ciufo
General Micro Systems, Inc.
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.
