Higher Performance COMs: COM-HPC is starting

Dan Demers, Director, Sales & Marketing, congatec Americas

High performance – high core count – utilize it best with the RTS Hypervisor

The global pandemic challenges all of us. Some industries are suffering while others experience an extra growth push. Digitalization is on the growth side. Growing data traffic and new application fields also push the use of embedded computers forward. The ever-growing demand for higher performance and lower power consumption is stronger than ever.

The low power concepts are firmly in place, with these embedded applications utilizing COM Express Mini, Qseven and SMARC modules. For higher performance re quirements, COM Express Compact and Basic are in use. Until very recently, however, there was no equivalent in place for the very highest computing performance requirements. This gap is now filled with the new COM-HPC module specification. COM-HPC extends the possibilities towards highest performance. Not only does it offer more and faster interfaces, it also supports faster and more power-hungry processors while providing more space for higher memory capacities. COM-HPC Client modules support USB4 with Thunderbolt and DisplayPort 2.0 with high refresh rates and color depths to drive multiple 8k screens. Server designs can leverage up to 64 PCIe lanes supporting the upcoming PCIe Gen 5 speed with 32 Giga Transfers per second (GTps). Ethernet is extended to 8 lanes with 25 GBps each, which allows for 2x 100G Ethernet implementations with COM-HPC Server modules.

While COM-HPC allows Computer-on-Modules to scale up to Server-on-Module levels, the server class CPUs with their high core count bring some challenges for embedded use. Not all systems can utilize all cores. Sequential process logic cannot always be optimized for parallel processing. This is where hypervisor technologies come into play: For embedded use, a real-time capable hypervisor allows partitioning of the complete hardware – the CPU cores, memory, cache and all the I/Os – and the ability to run the multiple physical systems with different operating systems. This is the easiest way to get the most out of multicore technology. This system consolidation even allows full hardware access for best real-time reaction. A consolidated system is just a single “box” that contains multiple systems. A typical use case is a motion or robot controller with hard real-time requirements, which needs an extra firewall or gateway system for secure communication, another system for video analytics or AI, and finally yet another system and still more cables to connect the user interface. The consolidated system in this case is just one box with an 8-core x86 CPU. This is partitioned and uses 2 cores for the motion control, 1 core for the secure communication, 3 cores for the vision/AI part, and the remaining 2 cores for the user interface. The mix of operating systems can be VxWorks or Real-Time Linux for the motion control, and a mix of Windows and Linux for the rest. Any other combination of operating systems is also possible.

Innovation is the clever combination of existing technologies. This brings real efficiency, the #1 target for a successful 2021.

COM-HPC extends the possibilities towards highest performance. It offers more and faster interfaces and supports extremely fast and thus more power-hungry processors than found in current embedded standards.

Tags: Predictions

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2021 at 4:45 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.