| Though it may seem counterintuitive, upgrading an organization’s computing platform saves energy, time, and money in the long run. This white paper explains a critical turning point in processors and chipsets that makes 2010 a good year for redesigns. |
“Technology refresh” is a hot topic amongst corporate IT departments across the globe. Budgets are designed to refresh the IT infrastructure every three to five years, depending on the organization. More often than not, end users’ workstations and servers in the datacenter employ current generation technology. Outliers are always present, but the platforms used commercially are almost always newer and replaced more frequently than those in the industrial and embedded markets. Solutions aimed at deployment into these market spaces are generally designed to obtain the longest product lifecycle possible so as to minimize redesign, qualification, development, and certification costs. It is not uncommon for a system design five to seven years old to still be in production with absolutely no desire to change it. New platform certification costs alone have the potential to soar upwards of $100,000 in some applications.
On the surface, it may appear that there is no driving factor to redesign a system; why should a program incur the costs associated with developing a new design? The economic landscape of late for many has been far from forgiving, and it has only just begun to turn around. Is now really a good time to incur the costs associated with something as large scale as technology refresh in the industrial and embedded space? Quite frankly, now is the time when it makes the most sense. Today, computer technology is at a pivotal point where one generation is quickly nearing the end of its useful life and another is just launching.
A vast majority of the higher performance industrial and embedded computing solutions over the past several years have been architected around Intel’s first and second generation Pentium 4 processor family and the 8XX series chipset. It has been a terrific platform for many years – providing performance where needed as well as stability in the supporting ecosystem. However, the remaining life of these solutions is diminishing quickly – more quickly than most in industrial and embedded spaces would like. As a potential solution, it may be time to re-evaluate your current platform and re-assess your solution requirements. Would your organization benefit from greater performance, lower power consumption (meaning less heat dissipation), and (often) lower system costs? Intel’s new Core i7, Core i5, and Core i3 processors in conjunction with the new 5-Series chipset family may be a great solution for you as a platform base to help achieve these goals.
Released earlier this year, solutions centered on the new Core family of products will be supported by the ecosystem until at least 2017. Refreshing your solution now provides for the greatest lifecycle duration in the future. Offering multi-processing core performance far exceeding that of the fastest previous generation Pentium 4-based architecture, these new processor solutions from Intel are very hard to discount as a viable solution in refresh efforts. In addition to simply providing a higher performance processing core, Intel’s latest processors also incorporate an embedded graphics processing unit within the processor package, supporting up to 1.7GB of shared system memory capable of displaying flawless HD video. What does that mean? The need for an external add-on graphics adapter has just been removed. The costs associated with maintaining a long lifecycle high-end graphics solution have vanished. Graphics capabilities are no longer a limitation and constraint of the board with which the processor is paired. The ability to select your platform independent of the graphics capability provided should prove quite beneficial for industrial and embedded designers. In addition, these solutions also provide for managed over-clocking (often needed in demanding compute-intensive environments), expanded system memory capacity, as well as many other features such as virtualization technology and AES encryption / decryption instruction sets to reduce the processor overhead required to translate AES encrypted messages.
Now is the time to begin thinking about refreshing existing architecture – the technology landscape is shifting. Power hungry single core processor solutions are yielding to today’s greener, more energy efficient multi-core solutions. Coupled with the fact that the ecosystem will be supporting this technology through most of the next decade, why not invest in a solution now in order to reap the benefits for many years to come?
[By Jonathan Couch, CCS Design Engineer]
System Redesign Expertise at CCS-Inc.
Jonathan Couch, Design Engineer for CCS-Inc., monitors Intel’s product roadmaps so that he can best serve CCS-Inc.’s industrial customers. He attends the annual Intel Solution Summit as well as seminars throughout the year.
Utilize our expertise! Contact CCS-Inc. if you would like more information on how CCS can assist with your next redesign.
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