OREANDA-NEWS. May 10, 2012. GE Intelligent Platforms today announced a new rugged single board computer (SBC) based on the latest 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ quad core processor technology. The SBC325 brings substantially increased processing performance to customers using the 3U VPX form factor to develop and deploy demanding industrial and mil/aero applications such as command/control, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), radar/sonar and signal processing.

3rd Generation Intel Core processors not only offer enhanced performance per watt but can also maintain full performance at more elevated temperatures than the previous generation – offering an opportunity for the development of new capabilities in small form factor applications.

Provision of either a mezzanine XMC/PMC site for optimum flexibility and expandability or a quad fat-pipe (x16 PCI Express®) for highest performance connectivity to GPGPUs makes the SBC325 an exceptionally versatile platform suitable for a wide range of High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) applications.

“Many of our customers are working on demanding applications that are highly constrained in terms of size, weight and power – and the 3U VPX SBC325 provides an outstanding solution,” said Rod Rice, General Manager, Military & Aerospace Products, GE Intelligent Platforms. “The improved thermal performance of the new Intel processor helps to deliver improved response times and throughput and reduce the thermal footprint of a solution - or reduce the number of boards required in a system, minimizing its size and weight.”

The new OpenVPX platform – which is 100% compatible with the previous two generations in GE’s 3U VPXcel3 family - makes for a cost-effective, straightforward upgrade path for existing users.

The SBC325 is available in five build levels, from benign (air cooled) to fully rugged (conduction cooled) to provide customers with optimum price/performance.

The SBC325 is offered initially with the 2.1GHz Intel Core i7-3612QE processor featuring Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX), up to 8GBytes of DDR3 memory and a solid state disk drive of up to 32GBytes capacity. These enhanced capabilities are complemented by a broad range of I/O options including Gigabit Ethernet, SATA, USB and audio.