congatec has expanded its ecosystem for modular edge servers. New products include a server carrier board in µATX form factor and COM-HPC Server-on-Modules based on the latest Intel Xeon D processors (Ice Lake). The new µATX server board for COM-HPC modules was developed for compact real-time servers that are used in edge applications and critical infrastructures. The board can be flexibly scaled with the latest high-end COM-HPC Server modules from congatec. Together with the updated modules, which are equipped with the latest Intel Xeon D-1800 and D-2800 processors, customers receive a ready-to-use µATX platform for applications with high performance requirements in a space-saving, robust design.
The ecosystem of COM-HPC modules and µATX carrier board offers OEMs a wide range of customisation options at module, board and system level from which developers can freely choose according to their needs. The ecosystem package is tailored to the stringent requirements of edge computing and offers powerful, reliable and ready-to-use building blocks for industrial environments. The modular approach shortens the time to market for new designs and also makes them future-proof.
The new µATX carrier board conga-HPC/uATX server offers maximum I/O and expansion options in a compact standard form factor. This makes the board an ideal solution for numerous applications, such as consolidating servers for virtual machines (VM) or edge servers for energy microgrids, video processing, facial recognition, security applications, smart city infrastructures and many other applications. The conga-HPC/uATX server offers multiple features to drive such applications, including robust communication options with up to 100 GbE and bandwidth, x8 and x16 PCIe expansion for processing AI-intensive workloads via GPGPUs or other compute accelerators, 2x M.2 Key M slots for NVMe SSDs and a M.2 Key B slot for compact AI accelerators or communication modules for WiFi or LTE/5G.
The new conga-HPC/sILL and conga-HPC/sILH Server-on-Modules take advantage of the latest Intel Ice Lake D-1800 LCC and D-2800 HCC processor series, which offers up to 15% more performance at the same TDP compared to the previous D-1700/D-2700 series 8. The improved performance per watt of the COM-HPC modules is ideal for high-performance applications that were previously limited by their thermal budget. They also benefit from Intel Speed Select technology, which makes it easier to balance the computing performance and maximum TDP of the system design. The latest processors have up to 22 cores with higher clock speeds to support next-generation edge applications with more performance per watt for more energy-efficient and therefore more reliable designs. Scalable edge performance and the modular approach increase the flexibility and future-proofing of designs, reduce total cost of ownership and shorten time to market.
The new COM-HPC server modules with their firmware-integrated hypervisor makes the evaluation of consolidating servers with virtual machines particularly easy. Also with full real-time capability, which is provided by TCC, TCN and optional SyncE support. This is particularly ideal for all networked 5G solutions that require very low latencies and strict frequency/clock synchronisation.
For the new COM-HPC Server-on-Modules based µATX solution platform, congatec also offers various cooling solutions, including passive cooling for small chassis. In addition to customising the conga-HPC/uATX server carrier board, the service package also includes customer-specific BIOS/UEFI and real-time hypervisor implementations as well as expansion with additional IIoT functionalities for digitisation purposes.
