RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif., 3 April 2006. General Micro Systems Inc.--designer and manufacturer of embedded computing products for defense, aerospace, and computer-intensive applications--has introduced the Rock (CC61x). The Rock is a rugged, conduction-cooled cPCI Single Board Computer (SBC) for military applications, and reportedly the first rugged cPCI SBC to provide full system health monitoring and reporting meeting all PICMG 2.9 specifications.
The Rock targets extreme military applications requiring high performance, low power consumption, and operation in extreme temperatures without the inherent costs associated with those capabilities. The highest-performance version is driven by the 1.4GHz Pentium M-738 processor with 2MB of L2 cache (14W maximum, 11W average). For ultra-low voltage requirements (ULV), the Rock is available with the Celeron M-373 with 512KB of L2 cache (12W maximum, 8W average).
A patent-pending design utilizing a microcontroller and FPGA performs the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) functions per PICMG 2.9, reports the results of the Built-in Test (BIT) and Extended Built-in Test (EBIT), and monitors and controls the baseboard temperature.
The microcontroller and FPGA are operational below and above the stated board operating temperatures. When the Rock is activated this duo reads the temperature and attempts to initialize the board's "core:" processor, Northbridge, Southbridge chip set, and the 82546 Dual Gig-E.
The CC61x comes with up to 2GB of ECC memory and up to 16GB of bootable Flash memory; the nearest competitor offers no more than 2GB. The larger memory capabilities enable higher system performance and can enable storage of a complete operating system in Flash.
The Rock provides sheer efficiency for the user with dual Gigabit Ethernet with a TCP/IP offloading engine on a PCI-X (66MHz/64-bit) bus. This dual-channel Gigabit device provides true Gigabit wire speeds in full duplex mode and utilizes a fraction of the CPU bandwidth when fully loaded.
The ROCK is also available in a convection-cooled version. Pricing for the conduction-cooled version starts at $4370 in quantities of 100 units.
