PC/104 boards keep the legacy alive with Quadro P1000 and Intel Braswell

PC/104 boards keep the legacy alive with Quadro P1000 and Intel Braswell

May 25, 2021 — by Eric Brown

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Adlink announced the “CM5-P1000,” the first PC/104 board equipped with Nvidia’s Quadro P1000 graphics. Meanwhile, ICOP has introduced a PC/104 form-factor “IBW-6954” SBC with an Intel Braswell CPU.

Adlink and ICOP have each announced products that support the legacy PC/104 embedded board form factor and run Linux and Windows 10. Adlink’s CM5-P1000 is billed as the world’s first PC/104 board featuring Nvidia’s Quadro P1000, bringing advanced graphics and AI capabilities to legacy customers. ICOP’s IBW-6954 brings its customers somewhat up to date with an Intel Atom processor from the 6-year-old Braswell generation. ICOP chose Braswell because it is the last Intel platform that can support both UEFI and Legacy BIOS.

Adlink CM5-P1000 (left) and ICOP IBW-6954
(click images to enlarge)

Once a standard has sunk its teeth into the infrastructure, it is hard to pry it loose. The PC/104 Consortium’s family of PC/104 form factors is still alive and well in aerospace, defense, and legacy industrial operations.

PC/104 was ratified in the early 1990’s as the first major standard for embedded single board computers and stackable add-ons, based on an earlier Little Board developed at Ampro. LinuxGizmos founder Rick Lehrbaum, who was a key developer of PC/104 as CTO at Ampro at the time, summarizes the history here.

In 2008, Adlink acquired Ampro and has continued to support the form factor along with other manufacturers such as Versalogic, Diamond, and others. PC/104’s most recent spin-off was the stackable PC/104 OneBank stackable PCIe bus spec, which in 2017 made it onto a Pi/104 carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3.

Adlink CM5-P1000

The CM5-P1000 continues Adlink’s mission to bring Nvidia graphics to embedded form factors. Earlier this month, Adlink announced the first MXM 3.1 modules with Nvidia Turing GPUs, ranging from the Quadro T1000 to the RTX5000. Now it has claimed another first for running Nvidia Quadro graphics on PC/104, but this time with Nvidia’s older Pascal architecture Quadro P1000.

The Quadro P1000 is equipped with 640 CUDA cores and enables 1.8TFLOPS performance. The 47W TDP graphics technology supports Nvidia’s CUDA Toolkit 8.0 for AI development. Other Adlink systems with P1000 support include its Coffee Lake based Matrix computers.

Adlink CM5-P1000 (left) and block diagram
(click images to enlarge)

Adlink’s CM5-P1000 adopts the 116 x 96mm PCIe/104 Type 1 format, which is suitable for the size, weight and power (SWaP) restrictions required by aerospace and defense applications. These include radars, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), unmanned ground vehicles (UGV), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and missile systems. Other applications include legacy factory automation and process control.

The board is equipped with 4GB of 128-bit GDDR5 and offers 96GB/s maximum memory bandwidth. There are 4x DP 1.4 ports and a PCIe x16 Gen3 bus.

The CM5-P1000 is available in 0 to 60˚C and -40 to 85˚C operating ranges and offers 95% @40˚C (non-condensing) humidity tolerance. Accessories include active and passive heatsinks and a heat spreader.

ICOP IBW-6954

The IBW-6954 adopts the 116 x 96mm PC/104 form factor. The SBC offers 3x quad-core Intel Braswell options: the 1.04GHz/2.0GHz Atom x5-E8000, the 1.6GHz/2.56GHz Pentium N3710, and the 1.6GHz/2.24GHz Celeron N3160.

As noted, Braswell supports UEFI and Legacy BIOS. In addition to running Linux and Windows 10, the IBW-6954 supports Windows 7 and Windows Embedded Standard 7 (WES7). We can see no examples in our catalog of Braswell-based PC/104 boards, but in 2014 Adlink introduced four CMx branded PC/104 SBCs with the subsequent generation Intel Bay Trail Atom E3800.

IBW-6954 rear view (left) and detail views
(click images to enlarge)

The IBW-6954 ships with 4GB DDR3L-1600 and offers a SATA interface with power support and optional mSATA on the single mini-PCIe slot. A PC/104 ISA bus interface is also available.

As usual with PC/104, there are no real-world ports, bur rather a variety of onboard and edge connectors. Features include Gigabit Ethernet, 4x USB 2.0, 4x COM, LPC, I2C, Parallel printer, battery, reset, and more. For media you get HDMI at up to 2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz plus HD-ready VGA and LVDS and speaker and audio I/O via a Realtek ALC262 codec. The 5V board has a 0 to 60°C operating range.

Recent ICOP products include the tiny, i.MX8M Mini based NX8MM-D168 module and a VEX2-6415 SBC, which supports two different OSes on each of the cores of its x86 architecture Vortex86EX2.

Further information

No pricing or availability information was provided for the “launched” Adlink CM5-P1000 or “coming soon” ICOP IBW-6954. More information may be found in Adlink’s announcement and product page and on ICOP’s announcement and product page.