Next-generation AI computing for the edge 

Deggendorf, Germany, 20 December 2023 * * * congatec – a leading vendor of embedded and edge computing technology – is introducing its latest range of COM Express Compact modules based on the Intel^® Core™ Ultra processors. Providing a unique combination of heterogeneous compute engines, including CPU, GPU and NPU, the new modules are an ideal fit to run demanding AI workloads at the edge.

Next to the powerful P-cores and efficient E-cores for general computing and the high-performance Intel^® Arc™ GPU for graphics-intensive tasks, the integrated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) called Intel^® AI Boost contributes advanced neural processing capabilities to the overall computational architecture. The integrated NPU enables highly efficient integration of advanced artificial intelligence workloads at lower system complexity and costs than discrete accelerators. This makes the new Intel Core Ultra processor-based Computer-on-Modules especially beneficial for combining high-performance real-time computing with powerful AI capabilities in surgery robots and medical imaging and diagnostic systems, where automatically generated critical findings can support medical personnel. Other application targets are situational awareness in industrial applications such as inspection systems, stationary robotic arms, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), and autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs), to name just a few.

“The new conga-TC700 COM Express Compact Computer-on-Modules provide application-ready AI capabilities in a plug-and-play form factor. Its ecosystem of customer solution-focused products and services significantly improves the time-to-market for implementing the latest state-of-the-art x86 with powerful AI capabilities as required in industrial process control, microgrid controller, medical ultrasound and x-ray, automated check-out terminals, powerful AMRs, and many more,” says Tim Henrichs, VP Global Marketing & Business Development at congatec. “OEMs can simply upgrade existing applications by exchanging the module and instantly gain access to cutting-edge AI technologies. It has never been easier to integrate artificial intelligence in x86-based systems.”

The feature set at a glance

The new conga-TC700 COM Express Compact Computer-on-Modules with Intel Core Ultra processors (code named Meteor Lake) are among the most power-efficient x86 client SoCs available on the market. Up to 6 P-Cores, up to 8 E-Cores, and 2 Low Power E-Cores support up to 22 threads, making it possible to consolidate distributed devices onto a single platform for the lowest total cost of ownership. The SoC-integrated Intel Arc GPU with up to 8 Xe Cores and up to 128 EUs can handle stunning graphics up to 2x 8K resolution and ultra-fast GPGPU-based vision data (pre)processing. The integrated NPU Intel AI Boost executes machine learning algorithms and AI inferences particularly efficient. Up to 96 GB DDR SO-DIMM with in-band ECC at 5600 MT/s contributes to power-efficient high data throughput and low latency.

The modules are supported by congatec’s OEM solution-focused high-performance ecosystem, including highly efficient active and passive cooling solutions and ready-to-use evaluation carrier boards. Customers can order the modules with pre-evaluated real-time hypervisor technology from Real-Time Systems for virtual machine deployments and workload consolidation in edge computing scenarios. Service offerings include shock and vibration tests for custom system designs, temperature screening, and high-speed signal compliance testing, along with design-in services and all required training sessions to simplify the use of congatec’s embedded computer technologies to round off the ecosystem.

The new conga-TC700 COM Express Compact Type 6 modules support the embedded temperature range from 0 °C to 60 °C and are available in the following standard configurations:

All features of the new Intel Core Ultra processor-based conga-TC700 COM Express Compact modules can be found here: https://www.congatec.com/en/products/com-express-type-6/conga-tc700/

For more information on the innovative Intel Core Ultra processor platform please visit https://www.congatec.com/en/technologies/intel-meteor-lake-h-based-computer-on-modules/

You can experience these and other innovations at embedded world from 9-11 April 2024: https://www.congatec.com/en/congatec/events/congatec-at-embedded-world-2024/

Visit congatec in Hall 3 at Stand 241

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About congatec 

congatec is a rapidly growing technology company focusing on embedded and edge computing products and services. The high-performance computer modules are used in a wide range of applications and devices in industrial automation, medical technology, robotics, telecommunications and many other verticals. Backed by controlling shareholder DBAG Fund VIII, a German midmarket fund focusing on growing industrial businesses, congatec has the financing and M&A experience to take advantage of these expanding market opportunities. congatec is the global market leader in the computer-on-modules segment with an excellent customer base from start-ups to international blue chip companies. More information is available on our website at www.congatec.com or via LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and YouTube.

WAKEFIELD, Mass., October 9, 2023. PICMG, a leading consortium for developing open embedded computing specifications, has announced the release of the COM-HPC 1.2 “Mini” specification. Measuring just 95 mm x 70 mm, COM-HPC Mini is nearly half the size of the next-smallest COM-HPC form factor and provides a cost-effective, lower power module for autonomous mobile robots, drones, mobile 5G test and measurement equipment, and other far edge applications.

A single, rugged 400-pin connector allows COM-HPC Mini to support communications interfaces such as:

• 16x PCIe lanes (PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0)
• 2x 10 Gbps NBASE-T Ethernet ports
• 8x SuperSpeed lanes (for USB4/ThunderBolt, USB 3.2, or DDI)
• 8x USB 2.0
• 2x SATA ports (shared with PCIe lanes)
• 1x eDP
• 2x DDI

The 1.2 specification defines a separate FFC connector for MIPI CSI, while its 400 pins also support signals such as Boot SPI and eSPI, UART, CAN, Audio, FUSA, and power management signals. A signal voltage reduction from 3.3V to 1.8V on most pins is in line with reduced I/O voltage on the latest low-power CPUs. The input power is limited to a maximum of 107W at a wide input voltage of 8V to 20V, leaving plenty of headroom for performance processors.

“The COM-HPC size A started at 95 mm x 120 mm, but the market loves the Mini size as well as the performance you get with COM-HPC,” says Christian Eder, Director of Product Marketing at congatec and Chairman of the COM-HPC Working Group at PICMG. “The whole trend of making things smaller and more power-saving was a reaction to market trends, and it will continue.”

Mini’s smaller footprint also provides mechanical advantages, such as a 15 mm stack height from the top of a carrier board to the top of a heat spreader stacked on a COM-HPC Mini module. This 5 mm reduction compared to other COM-HPC variants means COM-HPC Mini modules must use soldered memory, which makes them inherently rugged through resistance to shock and vibration and provides direct thermal coupling to heat spreaders.

“The new revision of the specification allows COM-HPC to address additional high-performance applications that require a smaller footprint,” says Doug Sandy, CTO of PICMG. “COM-HPC 1.2 is a great solution that completes the spectrum of solutions of COM Express through COM-HPC Server Modules.”

“The COM-HPC Mini specification leverages the high-speed capabilities and SI performance of existing COM-HPC interconnect solutions,” says Matthew Burns, Global Director of Technical Marketing at Samtec. “Dropping one 400-pin connector enables small form-factors without sacrificing the data throughput demanded at the Far Edge.”

PICMG members ADLINK, congatec, Samtec, SECO, and others have either already released or plan to release COM-HPC 1.2 product in the near future.

The COM-HPC 1.2 specification can be downloaded today for $750 from the PICMG website at www.picmg.org/product/com-hpc-module-base-specification-revision-1-2. A COM-HPC 1.2 Carrier Design Guide is scheduled for release in early 2024.

For more information, visit www.picmg.org/openstandards/com-hpc.

About PICMG

Founded in 1994, PICMG is a not-for-profit 501(c) consortium of companies and organizations that collaboratively develop open standards for high performance industrial, Industrial IoT, military & aerospace, telecommunications, test & measurement, medical, and general-purpose embedded computing applications. There are over 130 member companies that specialize in a wide range of technical disciplines, including mechanical and thermal design, single board computer design, high-speed signaling design and analysis, networking expertise, backplane, and packaging design, power management, high availability software and comprehensive system management.

Key standards families developed by PICMG include COM-HPC, COM Express, CompactPCI, AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA, AdvancedMC, CompactPCI Serial, SHB Express, MicroSAM, and HPM (Hardware Platform Management). www.picmg.org.

A quantum leap in core count

San Diego, Las Vegas/USA, 4 January 2022 * * * congatec – a leading vendor of embedded and edge computing technology – introduces the 12th Generation Intel Core mobile and desktop processors (formerly code named Alder Lake) on 10 new COM-HPC and COM Express Computer-on-Modules. Featuring the latest high performance cores from Intel, the new modules in COM-HPC Size A and C as well as COM Express Type 6 form factors offer major performance gains and improvements for the world of embedded and edge computing systems. Most impressive is the fact that engineers can now leverage Intel’s innovative performance hybrid architecture. Offering of up to 14 cores/20 threads on BGA and 16 cores/24 threads on desktop variants (LGA mounted), 12th Gen Intel Core processors provide a quantum leap [1] in multitasking and scalability levels. Next-gen IoT and edge applications benefit from up to 6 or 8 (BGA/LGA) optimized Performance-cores (P-cores) plus up to 8 low power Efficient-cores (E-cores) and DDR5 memory support to accelerate multithreaded applications and execute background tasks more efficiently.

In addition, the mobile BGA processors with, up to 96 Execution Units of the integrated Intel Iris X^e GPU have been estimated to deliver extraordinary improvements of up to 129% [2] in graphics performance for immersive user experience and can also process parallelized workloads faster, such as artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, as compared to the 11th Gen Intel Core processors.

Optimized for highest embedded client performance, the graphics of the LGA processor based modules delivers now up to 94 % faster performance and its image classification inference performance has nearly tripled with up to 181% higher throughput [3]. In addition the modules offer massive bandwidth to connect discrete GPUs for maximum graphics and GPGPU based AI performance. Compared to the BGA versions, these and all other peripherals benefit from doubled lane speed as they come with ultra-fast PCIe 5.0 interface technology in addition to PCIe 4.0 off the processor. Furthermore, the desktop chipsets provide up to 8x PCIe 3.0 lanes for additional connectivity and the mobile BGA variants also offer up to 16x PCIe 4.0 lanes off the CPU and up to 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes off the chipset.

Target industrial markets for both BGA and LGA variants can be found wherever high end embedded and edge computer technology is deployed. This includes, for example, edge computers and IoT gateways incorporating multiple virtual machines for smart factories and process automation, AI based quality inspection and industrial vision, real-time collaborative robotics, and autonomous logistics vehicles for warehouses and shipping. Typical outdoor applications include autonomous vehicles and mobile machines, video security and gateway applications in transportation and smart cities, as well as 5G cloudlets and edge devices requiring AI supported packet inspection.

“Leveraging Intel’s innovative performance hybrid architecture with impressive P – core performance in combination with power efficient E – cores Intel Thread Director assigns each workload to the proper cores for optimum performance. Selected processors are also suitable for hard real-time applications with Intel TCC and TSN. In combination with full support for Real-Time Systems’ hypervisor technology, they are the ideal platform to consolidate a multitude of different workloads on one single edge platform. As this applies to low-power and high-performance scenarios alike, it enables highly sustainable designs with a small ecological footprint,” explains Christian Eder, Director Marketing at congatec.

Besides highest bandwidth and performance, the new flagship COM-HPC Client and COM Express Type 6 modules impress with dedicated AI engines supporting Windows ML, Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit and Chrome Cross ML. The different AI workloads can seamlessly be delegated to the P-cores, E-cores, as well as the GPU execution units to process even the most intensive edge AI workloads. The built-in Intel Deep Learning boost technology leverages different cores via Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI), and the integrated graphics supports AI accelerated DP4a GPU instructions that can even be scaled to dedicated GPUs. Furthermore, Intel’s lowest power built-in AI accelerator, the Intel Gaussian & Neural Accelerator 3.0 (Intel GNA 3.0), enables dynamic noise suppression and speech recognition and can even run while the processor is in low power states for wake-up voice commands.

Combining these features with support for Real-Time Systems’ hypervisor technology as well as OS support for Real-Time Linux and Wind River VxWorks, makes these modules a truly rounded ecosystem package to facilitate and accelerate the development of edge computing applications.

The 12th Gen Intel Core mobile processor based conga-TC670 COM Express Type 6 Compact modules (95 mm x 95 mm) and the conga-HPC/cALP COM-HPC Client Size A modules (120 mm x 95 mm) will be available in the following configurations:

12th Gen Intel Core desktop processor based conga-HPC/cALS COM-HPC Client Size C modules (120 mm x 160 mm) will be available in the following variants:

All these modules come with comprehensive board support packages for all these leading RTOSes, including hypervisor support from Real-Time Systems as well as Linux, Windows and Android.

For more information on the conga-HPC/cALS COM-HPC Client Size C modules, please visit https://www.congatec.com/en/products/com-hpc/conga-hpccals/

Further information on the new conga-HPC/cALP COM-HPC Client Size A modules can be found at: https://www.congatec.com/en/products/com-hpc/conga-hpccalp/

To find out more about the conga-TC670 COM Express Type 6 Compact modules, please visit https://www.congatec.com/en/products/com-express-type-6/conga-tc670/

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About congatec

congatec is a rapidly growing technology company focusing on embedded and edge computing products and services. The high-performance computer modules are used in a wide range of applications and devices in industrial automation, medical technology, transportation, telecommunications and many other verticals. Backed by controlling shareholder DBAG Fund VIII, a German midmarket fund focusing on growing industrial businesses, congatec has the financing and M&A experience to take advantage of these expanding market opportunities. congatec is the global market leader in the Computer-on-Modules segment with an excellent customer base from start-ups to international blue chip companies. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Deggendorf, Germany, the company reached sales of 127.5 million US dollars in 2020. More information is available on our website at www.congatec.com or via LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

 Text and image available at: https://www.congatec.com/en/congatec/press-releases.html

Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.  

[1] Previous congatec COM Express Type 6 and COM-HPC Client size A modules with 11th Gen Intel Core and Xeon processors featured up to 8 cores.

[2] Source: Measurements by Intel as of November 2021. Single-threaded performance measured with SPECrate2017_int_base (1-copy)IC19_0u4. Multithreaded performance measured with SPECrate2017_int_base (n-copy)IC19_0u4. Graphics performance measured with 3DMark Ver. 2.11.6846, Fire Strike graphics score. GPU image classification inference performance measured with MLPerf TM v1.1 OpenVINO v2021.4.1,

resnet50: Offline, int8, GPU. MLPerf Inference Edge v1.1 Inference ResNet-v1.5; Result not verified by the MLCommons Association. The MLPerf name and logo are trademarks of MLCommons Association in the United States and other countries. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use strictly prohibited. See www.mlcommons.org for more information.10th Gen Intel Core processors are the previous generation in this series for IoT. Configuration 1: Processor: Intel Core i9-12900E PL1=65W TDP, 16(8+8)C, 24T, Turbo up to 5.0GHz. Graphics: Intel UHD Graphics 770 driven by X e Architecture. Memory: 32GB DDR5-4800.

Storage: Intel SSDPEKNW010T8 (1024 GB, PCI-E 3.0 x4). OS: Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 21H2.Bios: ADLSFWI1.R00.2355.B00.2108270706 (08/27/2021). CPUz Microcode: 0xD. Configuration 2: Processor:

Intel Core i9-10900E PL1=65W TDP, 10C, 20T, Turbo up to 5.2GHz. Graphics: Intel UHD Graphics 630. Memory: 32GB DDR4-2933. Storage: Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB. OS: Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC

21H2. Bios: AMI UEFI (03/23/2021) CPUz Microcode: 0xCA.

[3] Source: Intel Core i7-12800HE scores are estimated by Intel as of November 2021. Pre-silicon estimates are subject to +/- 7 percent error. Intel Core i7-11850HE scores are measured by Intel. Single-threaded performance measured with SPECrate2017_int_base (1-copy)IC19_0u4 (est). Multithreaded performance measured with SPECrate2017_int_base (n-copy)IC19_0u4 (est). Graphics performance measured with 3DMark Fire Strike graphics score. Configuration 1: Processor: Intel Core i7-12800HE, PL1=45W, (6C+8c) 14C, 20T, Turbo up to 4.6GHz. Graphics: Intel Iris Xe Graphics Architecture with up to 96 EUs. Memory: DDR5-4800 2x32GB. Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus (CPU attached). OS: Windows* 10 20H2, Windows Defender OFF, Virtual Based Security OFF. Configuration 2: Processor: Intel Core i7-11850HE (TGL-H), PL1=45W TDP, 8C16T, Turbo up to 4.7GHz. Graphics: Intel Xe Graphics Architecture with up to 32 EUs. Memory: DDR4-3200 2x32GB. Storage: Intel SSDSC2KW512GB (512 GB, SATA-III). Platform/ motherboard: Intel internal reference platform. OS: Windows 10 Pro 21H1, Windows Defender OFF, Virtual Based Security OFF. Bios: TGLSFWI1.R00.4151.A01.2104060640 (Release date: 04/06/2021).CPUz Microcode: 28h