From barely having dual-core CPUs two years ago, Freescale is now shipping eight-core QorIQ (pronounced “core IQ”) CPUs such as the P4080. Extreme Engineering takes advantage of those 1.5 GHz e500 cores in its XPedite5470 3U OpenVPX SBC. Designed for air- and conduction-cooled chassis, the board runs 0 to +55 °C or -40 to +85 °C and boasts BSPs for Linux, VxWorks, QNX Neutrino, and INTEGRITY. The same basic design is also available in 3U CompactPCI, PMC/XMC, VME, and 6U VPX and CompactPCI flavors.
The CPU is kept fed via 8 GB of DDR3-133 ECC SDRAM in two channels (4 GB each), along with 256 MB of NOR and 16 GB of NAND flash. Boot loader code stored in NVRAM can be hardware write protected to assure no nefarious (or accidental) overwrites occur. I/O is straightforward: Serial RapidIO, x4 PCIe, SERDES GbE, 2 optional 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, and the always-popular RS-232/422/485 ports (2). Additional I/O can be added via PrPMC or XMC. There’s also I2C and a real-time clock.