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Intel® Xeon® D Pushes Military Applications Forward

While recent trends in high-end rugged computing have emphasized heterogeneous architectures, the Intel® Xeon® D family makes a strong case for general-purpose architectures. As the first Xeon processor qualified for extended temperature ranges, the Xeon D offers more flexibility and higher performance than is typical for embedded products.

Specifically, the Xeon D line supports a temperature range stretching from -40C to 85C. The Xeon D family isn’t the first set of Intel® chips to support this range, but the company’s previous extended-temperature products were derived from its Intel Atom® processor line. Intel Atom CPUs emphasize low power consumption rather than high performance.

As such, the Xeon D processors, offer considerably greater performance than older extended-temperature processors. This means the new processors can take on tasks that previously required a heterogeneous architecture, e.g., a CPU plus an FPGA. By running everything on a Xeon D instead, you get a simpler, more scalable system architecture.

The Xeon D family also offers an impressive degree of flexibility. With a wide range of core counts (4-16), clock speeds (1.3GHz – 2.7GHz Turbo), and TDPs (20-65W), the family can tackle a wide range of requirements.

A white paper from Curtiss-Wright explains how these new capabilities allow the Xeon D family to take on many different application roles and system tasks. The highlighted systems are:

  • A 3U system designed for non-throttling performance up to an 85°C sidewall temperature in a conduction-cooled environment.
  • A two-socket 6U system with support for up to 16 cores per socket and up to 32GB of DRAM per CPU.
  • A 6U system with just one CPU socket but far more memory (up to 128GB).

This variety of configurations illustrates how Xeon D can scale to meet many different needs—including extreme requirements in terms of temperature, compute, and memory capacity.

On that last point, Curtiss-Wright points out that sensor fusion – the process of combining data from multiple sources – is a good example of a memory-hungry application. Multiple high-resolution and/or high-sampling-frequency sensors can generate enormous amounts of data very quickly.

To analyze the data in real time, a system needs both massive compute power and an extraordinarily large RAM. The single-socket, 128GB system illustrates how architectures based on Xeon processors can rise to the challenge – and how taking the CPU-only approach results in a simpler design than an equivalent heterogeneous system.

In short, the high-performance, flexible configuration and broad temperature range of the Xeon D make it an excellent choice for a variety of use cases. The ability to scale out to 32 cores or up to 128GB of RAM is particularly noteworthy, while the ability to scale down to 4 cores means that low-power requirements can be addressed with the same architecture.

About the Author

Kenton Williston is an Editorial Consultant to insight.tech and previously served as the Editor-in-Chief of the publication as well as the editor of its predecessor publication, the Embedded Innovator magazine. Kenton received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2000 and has been writing about embedded computing and IoT ever since.

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