Welcome back, “MVMExxxx”

Those of you kicking around the VME market for more than 10 years will recognize the prefix “MVME” as the de facto moniker of VME’s progenitor: Motorola Computer Group. These four letters took the market by storm some 25 years ago, and every other VME vendor always played catch-up to the market-leading products from Moto. Of course, back then Motorola also made the CPUs – now manufactured by Intel and Freescale – so one might expect that MCG had a bit of the inside track. Which brings us to today: The company’s first new MVME7100 product in … well, a while. Now owned by Emerson Network Power, the MVME7100 uses a dual-core Freescale MPC8641D, high-capacity DDR2 DRAM, up to 8 GB of NAND flash, PCI-X, USB, and 2eSST to complement the VME64 bus. You’ll also find dual memory controllers and a DMA engine capable of scatter-gather, PCIe, local I/O, and a GbE port. The memory is battery-backed, and there are twin PMC sites. In short: It’s all here, in a contemporary SBC design. Ah, shucks. We’ve missed you, “MVME.”