Two 3U OpenVPX boards creep into 6U performance rates
Two scalable, modular Intel-based 3U OpenVPX single board systems offer more I/O, processing, and patented cooling technology than is possible in 6U size, says General Micro Systems (GMS).
The X9 Spider 3U OpenVPX single board systems have been developed with the Modular Open Standards Approach (MOSA) and are aligned to the the Open Group Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) technical standard. “The upside of OpenVPX and SOSA is interoperability and . . . a modular open standards approach (MOSA), but the backplane can also be restrictive for I/O, bandwidth and upgradeability,” says Ben Sharfi, GMS founder and chief architect.
The X9 Spider VPX-HS and VPX-S are based on an Intel 11th generation Tiger Lake-H 8 Core i7 CPU with 64Gbyte of memory. Conduction- and air-cooled versions are available. Both are intended for deployment in military and aerospace or rugged applications.
They have a large bandwidth via multiple sealed USB4 and 100Gbit Ethernet ports, offering up to 455Gbits per second. This is sufficient to free designers from the bottlenecks of the OpenVPX backplane, says GMS, while remaining interoperable with other industry vendors’ boards and systems.
The X9 Spider VPX-HS is a two-slot single board system equipped with sealed, quad 40Gbits per second USB4 Type-C ports and dual 100Gbits per second Ethernet ports, which collectively provide 360Gbits per second of data pipelines to other boards, systems and sensors. The -HS version includes two additional M.2 SSD sites and a high bandwidth Nvidia general purpose GPU co-processor MXM site that doubles as a PCIe bus extender.
The single-slot X9 SPIDER VPX-S that omits the dual 100Gbits per second Ethernet fibre ports, the MXM site, and has dual M.2 SSDs.
Both VPX module types also include two PCIe-Mini add-in card sites, 10Gbit Ethernet, USB 3.2 and other on-board ports.
Cooling the dense modules is accomplished via GMS patented RuggedCool and RuggedCool2 hot spot cooling, floating heat plane, and multi-link three-side cooling wedgelocks. Collectively, these cooling solutions provide over 100W+ of cooling per 3U OpenVPX slot.
PCIe Gen 4 on-board fabrics move data to the backplane and the 100Gbit Ethernet ports at 16Gtransfer per second with low latency. As a SOSA-aligned payload profile board, all mandatory I/O is present on the P0-P2 connectors, making the board backplane interoperable with other vendors and in spirit with the DoD [Department of Defense] Tri-Service memo requiring a Modular Open Standards Approach (MOSA) to systems design.
The company has also announced up to four on-board solid state devices (SSDs) for embedded RAID data storage, two PCIe-Mini sites, and an add-in Nvidia RTX5000GPGPU artificial intelligence (AI) co-processor and a 12V DC-only scalable architecture that transcends the restrictive OpenVPX bus, says the company. One GMS module set can replace an entire chassis of OpenVPX modules, it claims.
The X9 Spider VPX-HS and VPX-S modules also provide sealed USB4/Thunderbolt4 and scalability. “Even though they’re SOSA-aligned and interoperable, we also provide the industry’s highest-performance features and a path for system-level technology refresh with CPU and pinout upgrades that avoid backplane re-spins,” added Sharfi.