Hardware - Industrial PCs: The C6670 industrial server from Beckhoff Automation is an advanced industrial server that incorporates two powerful Intel Xeon processors, each with six, 12, or 18 cores for many-core machine control. This is a Control Engineering 2016 Engineers’ Choice Honorable Mention.
As the latest milestone in breaking through performance limits of industrial control systems, Beckhoff Automation has introduced a new industrial server product line that enables "many-core machine control." The C6670 industrial server from Beckhoff represents one of the most powerful controllers ever to reach the industrial market. In addition to computationally-intensive control technology, the C6670 can also be used, for example, in complex applications such as highly articulated robotics and advanced image processing.
Designed for control cabinet installation, the C6670 server incorporates two Intel Xeon processors, each with 6, 12, or 18 cores, working together on a motherboard with two Gigabit Ethernet controllers and a powerful graphics card. Apart from the massive performance levels delivered by up to 2 TB DDR4 RAM, there are four PCIe x16 Gen III slots, one PCIe Gen III x 8 slot and one PCIe Gen II x 4 slot for multiple interface cards and maximum flexibility.
This approach means that in addition to a machine’s control functions—PLC, motion, robotics, and CNC—further functions such as advanced measurement technology, condition monitoring, and visualization are all integrated into one powerful software package, TwinCAT, and executed on one powerful PC-based controller. With TwinCAT 3.1 it is possible to optimally utilize all available processor cores by intelligently distributing individual control tasks among them. With the development of the C6670, Beckhoff delivers the benefits of many-core technology to machine control projects. Previously existing limits all but disappear for users’ application ideas, which are freed by a dramatically faster and more powerful machine control platform.
Beckhoff Automation, www.beckhoffautomation.com
