General Micro Systems announces first sub-$1000 CompactPCI SBC
DECEMBER 30--General Micro Systems (Rancho Cucamonga, CA; www.gms4sbc.com), a supplier of VMEbus and CompactPCI board-level products and systems, is now offering the C165, a sub-$1000 CompactPCI single-board computer. Featuring a Pentium III or Pentium III Celeron processor operating at speeds of up to 1 GHz, the hot-swappable C165 can operate as a system or peripheral master.
The C165 is equipped with up to 1 Gbyte of SODIMM main memory and 256 kbytes of on-die cache and features a high-performance AGP video subsystem, two PICMG 2.16-compliant Ethernet ports, four USB ports, one PMC site, and an on-board 2.5-in. hard drive. This combination makes the C165 ideal for a wide range of cost-sensitive industrial applications, including telecom/datacom equipment, application-specific server blades, factory automation controllers, embedded medical instrumentation, and military/aerospace control systems.
The C165's processing, memory, and I/O subsystems are partitioned to enhance parallelism and maximize overall system throughput. The board's 850-MHz Pentium III processor (1 GHz optional), equipped with 256 kbytes of on-die L2 cache, uses an Intel 440BX Northbridge to access main memory. The Northbridge also provides two 32-bit PCI local buses. One bus, operating at 33 MHz, provides access to local I/O, Ethernet subsystems. The second bus, operating at 66 MHz, connects to an AGP bus, which drives the high-bandwidth video display subsystem. Both the Pentium III processor and 440BX Northbridge/Southbridge are part of Intel's Embedded Roadmap, which guarantees a minimum five-year life cycle.
The C165 provides all the I/O, mass storage, and networking capability of a full desktop system. In addition to standard keyboard, mouse, and timer functions, the C165 provides four USB ports, two serial ports, four Mbytes of BIOS and user flash, and two IDE DMA-33 ports, one of which can be equipped with a 2.5-inch, hard drive, the other of which can be used to install an optional 32-Mbyte Disk-On-Chip flash drive on board. The C165 also provides two 10/100 Base-Tx Ethernet controllers. One controller is routed to the front panel. The second controller supports the PCIMG 2.16 Ethernet Packet Switched Backplane, which provides a standard protocol for backplane communications between multiple boards or chassis.