Motorola launches its fastest processor blade

By Control Engineering Staff September 5, 2002

Tempe, AZ— Motorola Computer Group , a part of Motorola Inc. (Schaumburg, IL), released Aug. 29 its 5385 CompactPCI controller blade. The 5385 is designed to function at the extreme performance levels and bandwidth required demanded by many telecommunication, industrial control and medical imaging applications.

Featuring a 1.2-GHz Mobile Intel Pentium III-M processor, 5385 is Motorola’s fastest ever CompactPCI board. It uses a Micron Copperhead chipset to support up to 2 GB of 266 MHz double data rate (DDR) SDRAM, a high-speed memory standard. It is also one of the first CompactPCI boards to feature a PCI-X internal bus for high-speed, on-board communication. Motorola designed 5385 to exploit this architecture by including dual-gigabit Ethernet interfaces to support PICMG 2.16 CPSB switched fabric backplane architectures.

Its compliance with the PICMG 2.1 hot swap specification and its support for Motorola’s Advanced High-Availability software for Linux reportedly makes 5385 an ideal open architecture building block for mission-critical applications requiring 99.999% or better service availability. It also supports PICMG 2.9 IPMI intelligent platform management interface, which defines a standard for chassis management and operating systems such as Linux, Windows 2000 and VxWorks. A 32/64-bit mezzanine expansion site enables equipment manufacturers to add a PMC module to customize 5385, and create an application-specific network blade.

‘5385 is a dramatic leap in all areas that impact performance, and shows that a balanced design can make short work of tasks that bring other CompactPCI boards to their knees,’ says Harry Weber, Motorola Computer Group’s product manager. ‘We have brought together one of our most aggressive prices with leading-edge performance and memory density on this blade to make it as easy as possible for equipment manufacturers to take advantage of state-of- the-art technology. This architecture brings the benefits of commercial technology to our embedded customers.’

Control Engineering Daily News DeskJim Montague, news editorjmontague@reedbusiness.com