Four Computer Cores on One Board

Heart of the blade server D7 are one or two high performance Dual Core Xeon processors, i.e up to four CPU cores with a frequency of 1.66GHz. In combination with the E7520 server chipset, all up-to-date serial interfaces are available on the board.

The D7 can optionally be used as a 64-bit/66MHz system or a peripheral slot board on the CompactPCI bus where it needs one or two slots depending on the configuration. It supports Hot Swap and PIGMG 2.16.

The board’s PCI Express lanes are led to the 2GB Ethernet interfaces at the front and are used for the connection of up to two XMC modules. The D7 supports 12GB Ethernet connections without performance losses, thus meeting the main requirement of a server application: communication.

In addition to typical PC functions like USBs and UARTs, the D7 offers an FPGA for configuration of application-specific I/O functions like additional serial interfaces, graphics, fieldbus interfaces, digital I/O, etc. For example, contrary to other server blades, the D6 does not incorporate a short-lived graphics controller; a simple visualization function is instead included in the FPGA.

In addition to the two Ethernet interfaces, a USB and a XMC/PMC slot and, optionally, a VGA/COM combination are led to the front. All other I/O functions are realized on a separate transition module.

In addition, two serial ATA interfaces for connection of mass storage devices, as well as PATA for an onboard hard disk or CompactFlash, are available on the D7. What is more, the board offers multiple memory variants like ECC DDR2 DRAM with a speed of up to 4GB and error correction, non-volatile FRAM, SRAM and NAND Flash for safety-critical applications.

The main target market for the D7 is telecommunication as it is a single board computer for typical Wintel or Linux applications. THe system includes networked installations like base stations, routers, switches, concentrators and other communication-specific computer systems.