RadiSys ATCA-4500, the First ATCA Single Board Computer for the 4G Market

AdvancedTCA (News - Alert) (ATCA) is supposed to be a more powerful, higher density computing platform than its predecessor, CompactPCI, so you’d naturally expect AdvancedTCA platforms to meet up with bandwidth and processing-hungry 4G wireless applications. Sure enough, RadiSys (News - Alert) Corporation, one of the great names in AdvancedTCA (not to mention advanced embedded solutions in general) has released the Promentum ATCA-4500, a new ATCA single board computer (SBC) powered by the new Intel (News - Alert) Xeon processor 5500 series (in particular the Xeon L5518 which offers more than a 50 percent increase in performance per watt per dollar over a dual socket Intel Xeon processor L5408-based ATCA blade).

The ATCA-4500’s high performance, large memory capacity and expansion flexibility was formulated to address advanced control, gateway and telecom server functions for a varied set of 4G applications including LTE (News - Alert) (Long-Term Evolution), WiMAX, NMS (Network Management Systems), and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). The processor and feature set were selected so it could pass the NEBS thermal requirements in chassis already deployed in the field, eliminating the need for a forklift upgrade. Support for a massive 8 DIMM array of VLP DDR3 scales up to 64GB of memory. Storage options include RAID, SAS (News - Alert)/SATA, solid state USB flash drives and the board supports iSCSI boot. For low-level software, the ATCA-4500 is based on Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), an advance over older BIOS firmware, providing a pre-operating system shell where customers can build and execute EFI applications, such as setup, OS install, diagnostic or configuration utilities. Support for extended Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x and VT-d) on the board decreases the overhead associated with virtualization. The ATCA-4500 has been tested against CP-TA guidelines to ensure interoperability across the ATCA ecosystem. IT

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