My company, IEI Technology Corp., is in the process of releasing two standard single board computers (SBC) in different form factors that each have access to 28 PCI Express (PCIe) lanes. (OK I'm punting my company's product but they do pay my salary and, if sales are good, give us bonuses!).
In industrial computing, expansion is critical. Having many expansion options enables a single system to be connected to large number of expansion cards or devices enabling the system to manage more applications or carry out more tasks.
However, most SBC (and specifically PICMG 1.3 form factor CPU cards) typically provide a maximum of 20 PICe lanes. Applications that required more than 20 PCIe lanes would typically use server grade motherboards. However, even though these applications require significant expansion, they do not neccessarily require the processing power of a server processor. Therefore developing solutions for these applications are expensive and wasteful of resources.
Recognizing this as an oppotunity, IEI has released two SBC with 28 PCIe lanes. The first was a PICMG 1.3 CPU card, the SPCIE-3600AM2, and the second was an ATX motherboard, the IMBA-3600AM2. These boards are especially apt for machine vision applications where large data streams are transmitted to and from the cameras.
Both SBC come with a NVIDIA MCP55Pro (NFP-3600) system chipset, support AMD Socket AM2 Opteron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron processors and 1.0 GB DDR2 memory modules.
Anyway, I thought these products were pretty cool and thought I would share. Let me know what you think.
Introduction to PICMG 1.3 : The new PICMG 1.3 specification (PDF link)
ATX Form Factor: ATX
Introduction to PCIe: An Overview of the PCI Express Standard
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