Performance Technologies Packs Storage and Opteron Into CompactPCI

Jan. 26, 2006

Performance Technologies showed off its 6U CompactPCI CPC5564 single board computer. It supports a 2.2-GHz single-core or 1.8-GHz dual-core Opteron offering 2 Gbytes or 4 Gbytes of PC3200 SDRAM...

William G. Wong

Performance Technologies showed off its 6U CompactPCI CPC5564 single board computer (see Fig. 1). It supports a 2.2-GHz single-core or 1.8-GHz dual-core Opteron offering 2 Gbytes or 4 Gbytes of PC3200 SDRAM memory with ECC support. It is expandable to 8 Gbytes. The board supports 32- and 64-bit operating systems. These include Linux, Windows XP, and Solaris.

The SBC has an on-board 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch that provides support for PIGMG 2.16 fabrics on the backplane. It has connections to the front panel as well as a pair of ports hosted by the HyperTransport north bridge. There is also a 1-Gbit Ethernet connection to the single XMC/PMC slot. The XMC/PMC slot supports PCI Express and PCI-X mezzanine cards. IPMI support is included on the board too.

Peripherals include keyboard and mouse ports, two USB 2.0 ports, two serial ports, and on-board video. There is an on-board EIDE controller that can support an on-board 2.5-in. hard disk, plus another connected via the rear transition module (RTM). There are four additional Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces for the RTM as well.

More storage is possible via the CPC5910 (see Fig. 2) or the CP5900. The two boards are very similar, supporting a pair of 3.5-in. SATA hard drives. This allows one of these storage blades to host 1 Tbyte of rotating media. The CPC5910 uses off-board controllers such as those found on the CPC5564. The CPC5900 uses an on-board processor and Gigabit Ethernet connection to a PICMG 2.16 fabric to support NAS or SAN interfaces. Both boards have hot swap hard disk drives. RAID 0 or RAID 5 (with multiple blades) is supported.

Related Links Performance Technology
www.pt.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.