QNX Neutrino RTOS Supported on VME board with Two Dual-Core Processors

February 2008, Colchester UK — Concurrent Technologies has announced support for the QNX® Neutrino® realtime operating system (RTOS) on its range of VME, VXS, 3U and 6U CompactPCI® and AdvancedMC™ products. QNX Software Systems is a market leader in OS technology and development tools for mission-critical applications; its QNX Neutrino RTOS sets the industry standard for reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability.

At Embedded World, in Nurnberg, Germany the Company showed a demonstration VME system, running the QNX Neutrino RTOS on one of its latest 6U VME64/VME320 single board computers – the VP 426/23x. The system, using multi-core demonstration software developed by QNX software engineers, demonstrates the benefits obtained using Intel® multi-core processors by showing the performance improvement obtained when cores are dynamically added or removed to a main task performing FFT calculations.

Evolution in Intel processor technology now allows the design of very high performance processing boards with much improved performance/watt results compared with earlier generation products. Tasks such as FFT calculation, traditionally performed by PowerPC based SBCs can now equally well be carried out by an Intel based processor board.

The VP426/23x is a good example of such a processor board. Featuring two 1.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® ULV processors, thus effectively providing four processor cores, the board provides up to 8 Gbytes on board DDR2 ECC dual channel SDRAM and features a variety of I/O interfaces which can be further expanded via the board’s PMC/XMC site, while still maintaining a single slot solution. To sustain fast control/data rates across the VME backplane the VP 426/23x also supports, as standard, the VME320 (2eSSt) protocol, offering transfer rates across the VMEbus of up to 320 MB/s.

This combination of high performance data processing, large amounts of memory and flexible I/O interfaces ensures that the VP 426/23x has one of the highest VME dual-processor specifications available today; it is therefore an ideal choice for intensive data processing applications within the communications, defense, security, telemetry, scientific and aerospace markets. An extended temperature version of the VP 426/23x is also available making it an ideal choice for applications within a variety of market sectors.

To make the most of the multi-core architecture, the operating system and ultimately the application must be designed to take advantage of parallel processing. The QNX Neutrino real time operating system has built in multi-processing capabilities to harness the power of multi-core processors, particularly relevant when used on the VP 426/23x VME board.

About Concurrent Technologies
Concurrent Technologies is an international ISO 9001:2000 company specializing in the design and manufacture of commercial-off-the-shelf and custom designed industrial computer boards for critical embedded applications. The Company, which was founded in 1985, has offices in the USA, UK, India and China as well as a worldwide distributor network. The company has a wide range of high performance Intel® processor based VME, VXS, 3U and 6U CompactPCI® and AdvancedMC™ products, which are complemented by an extensive offering of PMC (PCI Mezzanine Card) and XMC (Switched Mezzanine Card) products. Concurrent Technologies is an Affiliate Member of the Intel® Communications Alliance (ICA), a community of communications and embedded developers and solution providers.

For additional information, please visit http://www.gocct.com

For further enquiries please contact:

Jane Annear
Concurrent Technologies Plc
4 Gilberd Court,
Colchester, CO4 9WN,
United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 1206 752626
Fax: +44 1206 751116
Email: jba@cct.co.uk

QNX and Neutrino are trademarks of QNX Software Systems GmbH & Co. KG, registered in certain jurisdictions, and are used under license. All other trademarks and trade names belong to their respective owners.