General Micro Systems announces industry's highest performance Mini-ITX motherboard.General Micro Systems has announced the industry's highest performance Mini-ITX motherboard. Known as the P620 Hawk, the new Pentium M-based Mini-ITX board is the first to provide a field-upgradeable CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. , and the first to provide PMC (1) See Portable Media Center. (2) (PCI Mezzanine Card) A PCI-based mezzanine card that is widely adapted to VMEbus, CompactPCI and PCI cards. I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output expansion. The P620 targets embedded PC applications with tight cost, size, and power constraints requiring high-speed numeric, data and video/graphics processing. Key applications include industrial control, mil/aero, outside plant and customer premises telecom equipment, small form factor PCs, video gaming, and security. The P620 measures just 170 mm x 170 mm, features a field-upgradeable Pentium processor module with multiple CPU options, consumes as little as 6W of power, and provides notebook-style power management facilities. Equipped with one Gbyte of 266-MHz DDR SDRAM and two Mbytes of L2 cache, the P620 features a high-resolution dual-channel display interface with 2D/3D acceleration, two Gigabit Ethernet ports with Boot and Wake-On-LAN capabilities, and an AC-97 audio Line In/Out interface. The P620 is packed with a host of standard I/O interfaces, including four USB USB in full Universal Serial Bus Type of serial bus that allows peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, digitizers, data gloves, etc.) to be easily connected to a computer. 2.0 ports, a CardBus interface (two type-II or one type-III device), two FireWire 1394-B ports (800Mbit/ sec), two serial ports, and 20 General Purpose I/O (GPIO GPIO General Purpose Input/Output GPIO General Purpose Input Output ) lines. Mass storage support includes two serial ATA (SATA (Serial ATA) A serial version of the ATA (IDE) interface, which has been the de facto standard hard disk interface for desktop PCs for more than two decades. The original Parallel ATA (PATA) interface was launched in 1986. ) buses and two Ultra DMA-100 buses, one of which is connected to an onboard 1.8-inch IDE hard drive or CompactFlash drive. The P620 also provides two PCI-X-compliant PMC mezzanine interfaces, which enables OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and to add application-specific I/O and networking options such as Ultra SCSI-320, 802.11g, Bluetooth and Fiber Channel. "The P620 provides the highest performance per watt of any Single Board Computer (SBC (1) (SBC Communications Inc., San Antonio, TX, www.sbc.com) A large, national telecommunications company that grew from a multitude of local and regional companies, including Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell and Nevada Bell, into a single, unified brand by 2002. ) on any platform on the market," said Ben Sharfi, president of General Micro Systems. "The P620's high-speed number crunching and multimedia capabilities, coupled with its versatile I/O and notebook-like power management features, make it the ultimate small-form-factor embedded PC. Equally important, its field upgradeable processor module increases system longevity by enabling designers to upgrade to faster and higher capacity CPUs, memory and I/O devices without having to swap out the motherboard." "Perhaps the most unique feature of the P620," added Sharfi, "is its ability to add high-speed PCI-based I/O via its two PMC sites. This is the first Mini-ITX board to provide PMC expansion, which enables OEMs to configure the board for a virtually endless array of applications without increasing its vertical profile." The P620's field-upgradeable processor module offers a range of CPU options for low-power and high-performance applications. For ultra-low-power applications, the P620 is available with Low Voltage (LV) 1.1-GHz Pentium M Celeron Processor, which consumes just 3W typical. For applications requiring higher performance on a tight power budget, the P620 is also available with a 2.0-GHz M Processor, which consumes just 12W typical. The P620 offers the same power management and power savings functionality found in notebook computers. The P620's Advanced Configuration Power Interface (ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) A power management specification developed by Intel, Toshiba and Microsoft that makes hardware status information available to the operating system. ) enables it to suspend applications running in main RAM and save them to battery-backed RAM when the system is idle. It also enables the P620 to reduce power consumption while it is operating by dynamically varying the processor's clock frequency and core voltage. In standby mode, the self-throttling processor consumes less than 1W, substantially reducing average power consumption. The P620's two-channel video display system provides outstanding performance and functionality. Equipped with 64 Mbytes of DRAM, the video subsystem features a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 (24-bit color), and provides 2D/3D video acceleration with OpenGL and Direct-X support. The P620's DVI-I (DVI-Integrated) See DVI. connector enables it to support either digital or RGB (Red Green Blue) The computer's native color space, which is the color system for capturing and displaying images. RGB was derived from our own perception of color because human eyes are sensitive to red, green and blue (see trichromaticity). (with Sync-On-Green) monitors. The P620 also provides an LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signaling) A transmission method for sending digital information. LVDS sends data over data high and data low lines rather than data and ground. bus with backlight control connectors to support flat panel displays, and a 4X AGP bus to support high-end AGP graphics devices via a PMC site. Additional multimedia support includes an AC-97 interface and 20-bit CODEC, which provides audio functions such as Line-In/Out and used for voice recognition. The P620 is available in standard convection cooled commercial (0 -60C) or extended military temperature (-40C to +85C) in conduction-cooled packages. Software support for the P620 includes Windows XP/ 2000, Linux, QNX, Solaris x86 and VxWorks-Tornado-II. The P620 costs $1800 in single-piece quantity (1.1 GHz CPU) and just $850 in OEM quantity. |
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