Editor’s Pick: Xeon-Based PXI Embedded Controller Launched

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Today’s Pick of the Week is a big deal for designers, engineers and researchers involved in automated testing. National Instruments (NI) recently announced two new products: The NI PXIe-8880 embedded controller and the NI PXIe-1085 chassis. Let’s start with the NI PXIe-8880.

This controller features an eight-core, server-class Intel Xeon E5-2618L v3 processor and a full system bandwidth of 24GB/s both ways. NI says that the Xeon CPU in an embedded controller board is an industry first. The NI PXIe-8880 comes with 8GB of memory (upgradable to 24GB) and 24 lanes of PCI Express Gen 3 connectivity to the backplane. In a nutshell, it provides up to twice the processing power and bandwidth compared to earlier generation controllers.

The 18-slot NI PXIe-1085 chassis also features PCI Express Gen 3 technology. It gives you eight lanes per slot for a matched total system bandwidth of 24GB/s. That also means it’s ready to scale for your future test and measurement applications. The NI PXIe-1085 is the industry’s first chassis to use PCI Express Gen 3 technology according to NI.

All that is a big deal, but the real news in all this is that when you pair an NI PXIe-8880 embedded controller with an NI PXIe-1085 chassis, you get the processing and throughput performance for computationally intensive and highly parallel applications like wireless testing, semiconductor testing and 5G cellular system prototyping. And if you use this hardware setup with software optimized for parallel processing like NI LabVIEW for system design, your productivity should soar even further. Your test times and costs should lessen and, ultimately, your time-to-market quicken.

The NI PXIe-8880 embedded controller can also bring a new performance levels to any modular instrumentation and data acquisition application you have cooking. If you’re attached to a PXI platform already, replace your controllers with the NI PXIe-8880. You should see up to double the performance in your test and measurement applications.

You can learn a good deal more about the NI PXIe-8880 embedded controller and the NI PXIe-1085 chassis from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. You can also download datasheets for each from the links at the end the write-up. Make sure to read the “Supercharging Test and Measurement Systems” paper linked at the end for a technical discussion on what the NI PXIe-8880 embedded controller and the NI PXIe-1085 chassis can mean for you.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Learn more about NI's new offerings here.