V269 General Micro Systems Equinox Ultra High Performance Dual LV Xeon VME SBC

The General Micro Systems V269 Equinox Ultra High Performance Dual LV Xeon VME SBC is the industry's first implantation of the Xeon-LP, 'Low Voltage Xeon' Pentium IV Class Micro-processors. The Xeon was developed by Intel specifically to address the embedded market needs of low power, ultra high performance. These Pentium IV processors, unlike the desktop or mobile class processors are from the Intel Embedded Group, which provides the performance of a desktop processor at half the power consumption and supports a long life cycle (minimum of five years). Further, the Xeon-LP supports Multi-Processing and is socketable. Therefore, it is upgradeable where the mobile class processors are not.

The Equinox is powered with TWO Pentium IV Xeon-LPs, each with 512KB of On-Die L2 Cache and runs at CPU clock speed. The CPU Clock speed initially starts at 1.6GHz, and is anticipated to go well over 3GHz in the future. The Front Side Bus (FSB) is an incredible 533MHz initially, and is expected to climb up. To facilitate such incredible CPU performance, and to guarantee that the memory and I/O devices have the full CPU bandwidth (which is an astounding 3.2 Gigabytes/s), tremendous attention was given to the system's architecture. The Equinox utilizes a Hub Technology for CPU bandwidth distribution. The CPU Front Side Bus is connected to a four port Hub. Three links from the Hub are capable of taking full advantage of the CPU performance. The first link, Link-0, is connected to four 64-bit DDR DIMM memory modules configured as a 128-bit wide memory bus. These four modules are clocked at 266MHz, and they provide up to 16GB of memory with a true transfer rate of 3.2 GB/s. The second link, Link-1, provides the system with dual PCI-X buses for high-speed system I/O devices via a Link bridge. Link-2, which is the third link, is connected to the "Special Application Module III", (SAM-III) which is an expansion connector. SAM-III™ is a third generation I/O expansion bus from GMS, which was designed to provide ultra high speed (3.2 GB/s) I/O, without bottlenecking the onboard System I/O or memory. The fourth Link, Link-3, is a 266 MB/s bus which is used for the low speed I/O devices on board.

The VME interface for the V269 is provided via the Tundra Universe II device. This device supports all VME-D64 Master and Slave modes of operation as well as the System Controller function. The VME interface of the V269 is carefully designed so that the V269 may be plugged into either a 5-Row or 3-Row VME card cage. There is an onboard regulator that provides the necessary 3.3V for 3-Row card cages from the System +5V.