Kontron wins early TEM business with new ATCA Quad-Core node blade featuring latest Intel microarchitecture

Kontron today officially released its latest AdvancedTCA 10 Gigabit node blade – the Kontron AT8050 – designed with the new and highly-anticipated Intel Xeon 5500 Platform with the latest 45nm quad-core processors, also released today by Intel, which represents a new milestone in microarchitecture technology.

The culmination of this launch has already produced early design wins for Kontron and an exceptional level of interest from major telecom equipment manufacturers seeking new Intel processor technology to fuel storage, security, and mobile and multimedia server network applications.

“Clearly a bright spot in today’s economy, COTS-based carrier grade open platform hardware such as AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA are opening up exciting new opportunities for TEMs to create and design new network infrastructure gear on a reusable, common platform,” said Benoit Robert, executive director, product management at Kontron. “This new Kontron blade is a very strong addition to our open modular platform portfolio and has already shown positive signs for unprecedented volume business.”

Kontron AT8050 AdvancedTCA blade – a sustainable competitive advantage for TEMs
In designing the Kontron AT8050 AdvancedTCA blade, Kontron strove to provide clients the best possible options to ensure they could maintain a continual competitive edge with their common platform business model. Kontron chose to design with a single quad-core Intel Xeon processor L5518 with a 60W power envelope, as opposed to a dual CPU configuration. The benefits of this are that – clients can still make use of one available AdvancedMC slot for further feature extensions; clients can maximize the amount of available memory at 24GB DDR3 Registered ECC VLP SDRAM and up to 48GB DDR3 once available; and, most importantly, clients can upgrade their existing node blades with the Kontron AT8050 without having to upgrade their chassis platforms, which they would have to do to be able to cool several dual-socket-designed quad-core node blades. The bottom line is the Kontron AT8050 provides the most performance and functionality without making sacrifices to power consumption.

Kontron quad-core ATCA blade with latest Intel microarchitecture innovation
The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, based on the latest Intel microarchitecture includes an Integrated Memory Controller with DDR3 support and Intel QuickPath Technology, Intel Turbo Boost, Technology and Intel Hyper-Threading Technology. These and other new microarchitecture innovations help increase performance by reducing memory bottlenecks, executing more instructions per clock - via improved caches for faster processing per core, and optimizing for specific workloads – by utilizing cache and Intel Turbo Boost technologies. Moreover, there are up to 8 cores or 16 threads for simultaneous multi-threading, which makes this Intel quad-core processor ideally built for virtualization configurations.

Kontron blade-level design details
Compliant to PICMG 3.1 Option 9, Option 2, the Kontron AT8050 features 10 + 10 Gigabit Ethernet on the Fabric Interface, plus two 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet on the Base Interface and two 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet via the Front Panel or RTM. Expansion features include one AdvancedMC mid-size slot supporting PCI Express x4, and SATA /SAS interfaces. The associated Intel 5520 chipset, which supports up to 36 lanes of PCI Express* 2.0 and directly assignable I/O for virtualization (VT-d), offers significant new enhancements to accelerate I/O traffic and lower CPU utilization in both native and virtualized environments.

Standard with Kontron blades are full IPMI and supervisory features for remote control capability with power on-off, clean shutdown, warm reset/cold reset controls via any IPMI channels including LAN when the payload power is off. Also available is the Kontron RTM8050, a rear transition module built with a SAS controller to support a Hot Swappable SAS/SATA Hard Disk on the RTM and/or a SAS/SATA AMC module populated in the Kontron AT8050’s one AMC slot.

The Kontron AT8050 is available with Kontron pre-integrated AdvancedTCA OM platforms in 2U, 5U, and 13U heights, which may be fully tested and integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux V.5.2, Wind River PNE Linux 2.0, and High Availability middleware from Enea to produce a ‘TEM-ready’ platform for accelerated system development.

Product Pricing and Availability

Kontron AT8050 10GbE Single Quad-Core Node Blade – RoHS compliant
Pricing: OEM pricing upon request
Availability: Now.

For more information on the Kontron AT8050

For more information on the Kontron AdvancedTCA CPU-boards

For more information on AdvancedTCA

For more information on AdvancedMC

For more information on MicroTCA