Taking advantage of ‘Sandy Bridge’ technology

GE Intelligent Platforms today announced the second in its planned family of new products that take advantage of the compelling potential of the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7 processors – formerly codenamed ‘Sandy Bridge’. The SBC324 3U OpenVPX rugged single board computer features a quad core processor operating at up to 2.1GHz, coupled with up to 8GBytes of DDR3 1,333MHz memory for exceptional performance in size-, weight- and power-constrained applications in harsh environments such as unmanned vehicles.

GE Intelligent Platforms SBC324 3U VPX
single board computer

Supported by GE’s extensive ecosystem of 3U VPX capabilities – which includes NVIDIA® CUDA-based GPGPU functionality, advanced graphics, high performance switches, high density storage and rugged chassis – the SBC324 is expected to be deployed not only in traditional 3U VPX applications such as command/control, but also in ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), radar/sonar and signal processing.

“The SBC324 brings superior processing performance as well as a range of other new functionalities such as integrated graphics and memory controller, Intel’s AVX technology for demanding signal processing applications and second generation PCI Express for faster interconnect,” said Rob McKeel, President, Military & Aerospace, GE Intelligent Platforms. “These add up to a solution that will deliver significantly more capabilities than have historically been possible with the 3U VPX architecture.”

The SBC324 also provides an upgrade for GE’s MAGIC1 Rugged Display Computer which combines the throughput of a second generation Intel Core i7 processor with the advanced parallel processing of an NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPGPU.

The SBC324 benefits from a range of PCI Express backplane configurations; an XMC site with I/O; two 10/100/1000BaseT Gigabit Ethernet interfaces; VGA graphics; HD audio; two SATA channels; four USB 2.0 ports; a PS/2 keyboard/mouse port; and two RS-232/422 COM ports.

A rich software choice is planned for the SBC324, including comprehensive Deployed Test Software (BIT and BCS) plus operating system support for Windows® 7, Open Linux®, VxWorks®, LynxOS® and LynxOS-SE®.

GE’s SBC624 6U OpenVPX rugged single board computer, based on the 2nd Generation Intel Core i7 processors, was announced on January 5. Three further additions to the family are planned for the near future, which will bring latest generation Core i7 performance to CompactPCI® and VMEbus systems, as well as to a new digital signal processing platform.