General Micro Systems today launched two MOSA-inspired 3U OpenVPX single board systems with more processing, storage and I/O than is available in 6U-sized boards twice the size. Based on an Intel 11th gen Tiger Lake-H 8 core Core i7 CPU with 64GB of memory, X9 SPIDER VPX boards are available in conduction- and air-cooled versions. Both products are intended for deployed military and aerospace or rugged applications and were designed in alignment with The Open Group Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) technical standard.
Unique to these modules is a massive I/O bandwidth via multiple sealed USB4 and 100Gbit Ethernet ports—up to 455Gbps—that frees designers from the bottlenecks of the OpenVPX backplane, yet they remain interoperable with other industry vendors’ boards and systems. Also available are up to four on-board SSDs for embedded RAID data storage, two PCIe-Mini sites, plus an add-in NVIDIA RTX5000GPGPU artificial intelligence (AI) co-processor and a 12VDC-only scalable architecture that transcends the restrictive OpenVPX bus. One GMS module set literally replaces an entire chassis worth of OpenVPX modules.
Based upon Intel’s Tiger Lake-H 8 core CPU, X9 SPIDER VPX-HS is a two-slot single board system equipped with sealed, quad 40Gbps USB4 Type-C ports and dual 100Gbps Ethernet ports, which collectively provide 360Gbps of data pipelines to other boards, systems and sensors. The -HS version also includes two additional M.2 SSD sites and a high bandwidth NVIDIA GPGPU co-processor MXM site that doubles as a PCIe bus extender. The companion single-slot X9 SPIDER VPX-S is also a single board system that omits the dual 100Gbps Ethernet fiber ports, the MXM site, and has dual M.2 SSDs. Both VPX module types also include two PCIe-Mini add-in card sites, 10Gb Ethernet, USB 3.2 and other on-board ports, boasting up to 455Gbps of total system throughput (-HS).
The conduction-cooled single board system modules are so densely packed that they can replace an entire chassis of 6U boards, yet are so interoperable that they connect with any USB4- or Ethernet-equipped system. Cooling the dense modules is accomplished via GMS patented RuggedCool and RuggedCool2 hot spot cooling, floating heat plane, and multi-link 3-side cooling wedgelocks. Collectively, these cooling solutions provide over 100W+ of cooling per 3U OpenVPX slot.
At the core, the boards use Intel’s latest 11th-generation Tiger Lake-H 8-core CPU with up to 64GB of ECC protected and upgradeable DDR4 DRAM. PCIe Gen 4 on-board fabrics move data to the backplane and the 100 Gb Ethernet “fat pipe” ports at 16GT/s with ultra-low latency. As a SOSA-aligned payload profile board, all mandatory I/O is present on the P0-P2 connectors, making the board backplane interoperable with other vendors and in spirit with the “DoD’s Tri-Service memo” requiring a Modular Open Standards Approach (MOSA) to systems design.
For highest speed and long-haul data movement, the X9 SPIDER VPX-HS is also equipped with dual 100Gbps Ethernet (fiber, 1km) ports. These dual “fat pipes” are an ideal way to create inter-chassis architectures, dual redundancy, or merely to increase by 10x (per port) the limited 10Gb Ethernet available on the OpenVPX backplane. 100Gb Ethernet is an unheard-of feature on 3U OpenVPX modules and X9 SPIDER VPX-HS has two.
Hard disk storage on 3U OpenVPX is uncommon, and X9 SPIDER takes it to a new level with two to four high density M.2 SSD sites: 2x on X9 SPIDER VPX-S and 4x on VPX-HS. Arranged via software RAID, the drives can realize RAID 0-50 on-board, saving a backplane slot elsewhere. As well, dual PCIe-Mini SAM™ I/O sites support legacy I/O like MIL-STD-1553, ARINC-429, CANbus, octal serial, GPS and more.
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