Thales bundles PowerNode 3 with PMC-RIO card

Thales Computers introduced a serial RapidIO distributed switch solution designed for VME systems. According to the company, they bundled the outstanding performance of PowerNode3 with a powerful and reliable switch fabric solution to allow the end-user the ability to interconnect computing nodes all together inside a signal processing calculator. The Serial RapidIO technology reduces pin counts while staying full duplex and provides a low latency packet-based interconnect data push. Additionally, the technology offers a very high degree of error management and provides a state-of-the-art architecture for reporting, and recovering from, transmission errors. The PMC-RIO mezzanine boasts its own distributed switch that prevents any system single point of failures, while Thales' Serial RapidIO switch fabric allows an aggregate throughput of up to 1.6GBps due to the 400MBps sustained link bandwidth (peer to peer).

"Bundling our award winning dual 1GHz PPC74587 PowerNode 3 with key features of the RapidIO technology, such as both front and back connections, will make this product very attractive to ruggedized military and aerospace marketplace," said Thales GM Alain Albarello. "What makes this solution really unique is to provide a full mesh fabric, implemented with a distributed switch solution, where the switch naturally grows with the number of nodes in the system. This has no equivalent in this market."

The company expects to ship the card—one PowerNode3 featuring dual 1GHz, 512MB memory, 32MB Flash along with RapidIO PCI mezzanine card mounted and tested, via LRU integration tests—as a whole unit together with a complete Lynx 4.0 (and VxWorks 6.2 in further versions) software suite to allow smooth and efficient installation. Pricing for the bundled PowerNode 3 and PMC-RIO card starts at $10,200.