Out in Front: September 12, 1996

The Pentura VME5-8700 is a Pentium-based system that blends the VME and Compact PCI architectures. It combines a 166-MHz PC-compatible VME CPU board, a PCMCIA card slot, a PMC card slot, five VME64 expansion slots, four 3U and one 6U Compact PCI slots, a 1-Gbyte hard disk drive, a 6× CD-ROM, and two additional mass-storage expansion bays in a 19-in. rack-mountable chassis . The system's standard I/O interfaces include two Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports and a 100BaseT Ethernet port in addition to the typical mouse, keyboard, serial, and parallel ports. All I/O signals are available on the rear panel.

The Pentura system has a number of optional configurations. The 32-Mbyte error-corrected CPU main memory is field-upgradable to 128 Mbytes, and the CPU's 2-Mbyte flash memory is upgradable to 8 Mbytes. Two- and 4-Gbyte disk drives are available to replace the standard drive. Further, the system's 500W ac power supply is replaceable with dc, redundant-dc, or redundant-ac power supplies.

The VME5-8700 is the first in a family of Pentura systems that combine VME and Compact PCI and will be available in the fourth quarter. Pricing starts at less than $13,000 in the base configuration.

—by Richard A Quinnell

Force Computers, San Jose, CA. (408) 369-6000, http://www.force computers.com.