Kontron PC/104-Plus™ single board computer with AMD Embedded G-Series

MICROSPACE® MSM-eO brings powerful graphics and long-term availability to PC/104-Plus™ designs

Eching, Germany/San Jose, California, May 02, 2011 – The Kontron PC/104-Plus™ single board computer (SBC) MICROSPACE® MSM-eO offers OEMs the most powerful embedded graphics currently available for PC/104-based SBCs. With long-term availability, the Kontron MICROSPACE® MSM-eO is based on the accelerated processing units of the AMD Embedded G-Series, which, along with a 64-bit CPU, also integrates a programmable graphics unit and a DDR3 memory controller. Using the Kontron MICROSPACE® MSM-eO and Kontron’s extensive PC/104 portfolio of expansion boards, OEMs can quickly implement small form factor applications with a level of performance that, until now, has only been possible with significantly larger systems with dedicated graphics cards.

The Kontron PC/104-Plus™ SBC MICROSPACE® MSM-eO integrates the single-core AMD T44R processor with 1.2 GHz together with an AMD Radeon HD6250 graphics unit. It supports the latest 3D graphics libraries such as OpenGL 3.2 and DirectX11. It is also ideally suited as an upgrade for existing PC/104-Plus designs that need more graphics performance with low power consumption. Additionally, the integrated unified video encoder takes the load off the processor when displaying high-resolution videos (1080i/p) making the Kontron PC/104-Plus™ SBC MICROSPACE® MSM-eO ideal for extremely compact multimedia applications, such as mobile infotainment systems, vending machines and mobile battery-operated systems.

With the support of DirectCompute and OpenCL 1.1, OEMs can also implement GPGPU applications with the MICROSPACE® MSM-eO in the low-power segment, using the computing power of the graphics unit for parallel data processing. OEMs benefit from these advanced computing possibilities through an extremely high performance per watt ratio, enabling smaller and more power efficient designs for applications such as industrial and medical image processing and digital signal processing in Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems.

The feature set in detail
With up to 4 GB DDR3 RAM, the Kontron MICROSPACE MSM-eO offers enough resources to speed up memory-intensive applications. Along with LVDS and VGA, the module also has a digital display interface (DDI) for DisplayPort, HDMI or DVI signals, allowing the flexible connection of a wide variety of monitor types. A total of two independent full HD displays (up to 1920 x 1080 pixels) can be controlled. Digital audio signals are transmitted lossless via high-definition audio and SPDIF. Storage media can be connected via two SATA interfaces, which also support RAID 0.1. For compact and robust applications, a socket for micro SD cards is also available. Two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces allow for the direct integration into network structures without additional expansion cards. Four USB 2.0 and four serial interfaces (RS232/TTL) allow the direct connection of numerous application-specific peripherals. The single board computer also has eight configurable GPIOs for implementing more application-specific I/Os. A 32-bit PCI bus connector (4 slots) and a 16-bit ISA bus connector are ready for the connection of numerous expansion cards through Kontron’s extensive portfolio.

The Kontron MICROSPACE MSM-eO offers software support for Windows, Linux and VxWorks and others on request. Pre-production models will be available in August 2011, serial production will begin in Q4 of 2011.

Further information on the Kontron PC/104-Plus™ SBC MICROSPACE® MSM-eO is available at:
http://www.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/pc104+sbc+and+peripherals/microspace+pc104+cpus/msmeon.html

For further information on Kontron’s PC/104 products, please visit:
http://www.kontron.com/pc104

Kontron’s white paper on the AMD Embedded G-Series:
http://kontron.com/AMD_GSeries/