HIAWATHA, Iowa, 7 July 2009. Military computer maker Crystal Group Inc. in Hiawatha, Iowa, is replacing the Intel Core2 Duo processors in the company's Rugged Series (RS) rugged computer product with the Intel Nehalem embedded processor.

"We see the market demanding architectures optimized for virtualization and high performance computing," explains Jim Shaw, vice president of engineering at Crystal Group. "We are in the process of temperature testing the boards to verify acceptable solder joint reliability in a MIL STD 810 environment."

The Crystal Group line of RS rugged server products are rugged computers designed for harsh environment rackmount computer applications for military and industrial uses. They are for extreme shock/vibe, extreme temperature ranges, sand/dust, salt/fog. All RS servers are designed to meet and exceed MIL-STDs 167-1, 461E/F, 810F, and MIL-S-901-D.

Choose Industrial (CS) servers, or industrial/commercial servers if you need computing in challenging industrial environments. CS servers are compact, powerful and feature rugged steel chassis construction and state of the art cooling features which make them perfect for extreme or industrial applications.

The Nehalem consists of Intel Xeon 5500 Series (LGA 1366) processors, the 5500 IOH (input/output hub), and the ICH10R ICH (I/O controller hub). Intel's QPI (quick path interconnect) architecture uses direct point to point interconnection between the memory and each CPU which in essence replaces the front side bus.

The 5500 IOH supports as many as 24 PCI Express Gen 2.0 lanes, while the ICH10R provides six SATA ports and 6 USB 2.0 connections. Additionally the board has 8 available SAS ports, using the LSI Logic 1068E controller chip which supports RAID 0, 1, 10, motherboard with an option for onboard RAID 5.

For more information contact Crystal Group online at www.crystalrugged.com.