Choose the Right Hardware Solution for Your Real-Time System

Key Takeaways

  • Intel® Xeon® W-11000E Series provides highest compute performance suitable for workload consolidation.

  • 11th Gen Intel® Core™ has a balanced performance/watt with wide variety of Intel technologies to support IoT applications.

  • Intel Atom® x6000E Series is the lowest power consumption with dedicated offload engine for flexibility to offload IoT services.

  • All Intel platforms that support real-time features provides adequate amount of system interfaces to support real-time systems for industrial applications.

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Introduction to Intel®-based Real-Time Platforms

Intel® processors are multipurpose, serving a wide range of use cases, and deliver high compute performance within allotted time windows. You can use a wide variety of Intel® processors to create real-time systems and other embedded applications, utilizing other advanced capabilities such as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) for low-latency Ethernet network systems, hypervisors for virtualized environments, and functional safety features.

Industrial processors recommended for real-time applications:

There are many considerations for choosing a processor platform such as performance, cache architecture, and interconnectivity with your I/O modules.

This article provides a brief overview of these considerations and how they can potentially impact your real-time operations.

Hardware Factors to Consider

This article discusses four primary factors to consider when choosing the best-fit hardware from a variety of Intel platform offerings for real-time use cases.

CPU Specification

Intel provides a wide range of processor choices that can meet developer requirements to build a real-time system. In general, Intel® Xeon®, Intel® Core™, and Intel Atom® processors are capable of supporting real-time computing tasks, hardware-assisted virtualization - Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT), and workload consolidation. 

With some SKUs offering substantial graphics capabilities, these processors can help improve both video stream processing and AI inference. Some of the processors also support extended temperature ranges that satisfy ruggedized requirements in industrial environments. 

Cache Architecture

Larger cache size is preferable for high performance demands and you will typically find larger caches on Intel® Xeon® W-11000E Series processors as compared to 11th Gen Intel® Core™ processors, and Intel Atom® x6000E Series processors.

All three processor series feature a shared Level 3 (L3) or last-level cache (LLC), with Intel Atom® processors featuring a shared L2 cache as well.

These processor series also feature Cache Allocation Technology (CAT), which allows you to partition shared caches and grant exclusive access for specific partitions to high-priority processes.

This helps reduce jitter that results from cache sharing and is covered in greater detail in the Introduction to Intel® TCC Mode article.

Memory and I/O Connectivity

Depending on use cases, different real-time systems will have different memory and I/O connectivity requirements. Each Intel® processor series with support for real-time use cases provides different memory capacity and I/O connectivity to support configuration expansion and various networking requirements. 

Select and Compare

You can get specification comparison between Intel® Xeon® W-11000E series processors, 11th Gen Intel® Core™ processors, and Intel Atom® x6000E Series processors with the Intel device selector.