The Core™ Duo/Core™2 Duo technology offers performance potential for Industrial PCs (that to date was only available for the server segment) and therefore opens up new application areas. All familiar Industrial PC product lines can be equipped with Intel® Core™ Duo or Core™2 Duo processors.

ATX motherboards with seven slots, slot motherboards for passive backplanes and 3½-inch motherboards for particularly compact Industrial PCs are available. Optionally an Intel® Core™ Duo T2500 2.0 GHz with 2 MB cache or an Intel® Core™2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz with 4 MB cache is used.

Dual-core Systems are automatically recognised by TwinCAT: one of the two cores is occupied by the real-time functionality, the other one is available for Windows applications. TwinCAT core computing resources that are not used by the real-time core can be utilised by Windows.

Many Industrial PCs enable installation of two hard disks that can be mirrored with the on-board SATA RAID 1 controller with Intel® Matrix Storage Technology. If one of the hard disks fails, the system continues to run. The faulty hard disk can be replaced and mirrored during operation. The PC is thus protected from data loss.

The motherboards can all be equipped with up to 2 GB of DDR2RAM and two Ethernet ports. In addition eight USB 2.0 ports and four serial RS232 interfaces are available on the boards. The Intel® GMA950 graphic controller integrated in the chipset offers analog and digital display connections in the form of LVDS, VGA and DVI, of which two can be used simultaneously under Windows XP. With the ATX motherboard both can be used as DVI connections if a two-channel ADD2 card is used.

Courtesy of Beckhoff