Posted on Thursday, April 05 2007 @ 1:06 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Earlier this week at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose,
Intel announced plans to start selling quad-core processors to OEMs and other developers of embedded products such as point-of-sale (POS) machines, communications equipment, medical imaging and other products.
Intel will start offering embedded versions of its Xeon E5335 and E5345 immediately, said Doug Davis, vice president and general manager of Intel's Embedded and Communications Group.
At the conference, Intel executives also plan to announce that the company will offer its own telecom server, the NSC2U. This high-availability system has a pair of embedded Xeon 5300 series processors and is geared toward technologies such as IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), IPTV and video-on-demand.
Finally, Intel executives will also discuss a new microarchitecture for its embedded processors that the Santa Clara, Calif., company is calling SOC (System on a Chip). The new architecture, Davis said, will combine IA (Intel Architecture) x86 processor cores on the same piece of silicon as the I/O and memory control hub.
This new type of architecture will start to address the needs of embedded system builders who are working with smaller form factors and are looking for a chip with greater performance that uses less power. For example, embedded processors developed with this type of technology will have thermal envelopes of between 15 and 75 watts, according to Intel.
"What you get is a higher-performance system on a chip with a small footprint and low power that is all based on Intel Architecture," Davis said.
Intel also presented a new motorcycle from Orange County Choppers at the conference. The bike featured an embedded Core Duo CPU to operate the kickstand, rear view camera, tachometer and speedometer.
