Markt&Technik: The year is still young - what are Adlink's resolutions?
Dirk Finstel: Adlink is currently the fastest growing embedded company and is currently the most active in the PICMG and SGeT committees to define the latest standards, such as SMARC 2.0 and PICMG COM.0 R3.0. Thanks to the sustained investment in Industrial IoT and the strengthening through the acquisition of Prismtech, we are on the verge of taking over the technical leadership here and shaping the industry in the long term. Our infrastructure in Europe with our development centers for IoT and embedded hardware and software and our production in Asia give our customers a competitive advantage that cannot be ignored.

Intel's "Skylake" is currently the hot topic in the embedded industry. However, the variety of models of this CPU generation can confuse users.
Yes, there are 48 SKUs in total, but only twelve of the H-series and five of the U-series with a runtime of seven years. We are concentrating on these, and even these 17 are sometimes difficult to differentiate, but experience has shown that the variety is necessary to serve all vertical markets and applications.

Which variants are actually interesting for the embedded sector?
The most interesting variants are i3, i7, i5 and Celeron - exactly in that order. The low-power versions of the i3 and i5 are not so often in demand because the price usually plays a very important role in these areas.

What are the advantages of the new generation?
ECC and non-ECC memory can be inserted into the same SO-DIMM socket. The DDR4 memory also offers increased bandwidth and therefore more performance. Furthermore, the graphics performance is up to 40% higher than the previous generation, there are more PCIe lanes and Windows 10 support. In addition, the thermal power loss remains the same or is lower, so no new heatsink or heatspreader solutions are required. This results in lower validation and certification costs and a faster time to market. The further improved configuration of the power dissipation, in which the clock frequency and power dissipation can be set individually by the user or the application, enables further use cases, cost savings and performance increases.

How do the operating systems or software use the new processor functions?
Newer operating systems support OpenCL or Media SDK "out of the box" and immediately benefit from the 40% increase. With older operating systems, these functions must of course be adapted. The same applies to the build-in security functions that Windows 10 supports. Many new applications in medical technology or digital image processing benefit from the HW decoding/encoding functions for media streaming.

Microsoft has announced that it will not adapt Windows 7.1 and Windows 8 to the upcoming CPU versions from Intel (Kaby Lake) and AMD (Bristol Ridge). What does this mean for embedded users?
We have often heard these statements in the past - Microsoft's statement also applies to the consumer sector. However, the Intel Embedded Division generally has a different support model and is in a position to continue supporting these operating systems. Windows 7 and 8 are still too new in the embedded sector to be discontinued.

What does Adlink offer with the new processors?

We have implemented Skylake on the following form factors: COM Express, Mini-ITX, PC/104, CPCI, VPX, PICMG slot card, Industrial Box PCs, Medical Panel PCs and Fanless Box PCs. We connect these with the IoT remote management products SEMA and SEMA Cloud. Of course, we also offer Board Support Packages (BSPs) for Windows, Linux and VxWorks as well as OpenCL and Media SDK support. And for EMEA, we also offer full custom design services from our location in Mannheim.

What other new products will Adlink be presenting at embedded world?
We will be presenting the Intel Atom platform Braswell on SMARC, Qseven, Mini-ITX and COM Express compact and the first SMARC module in accordance with the SMARC 2.0 standard. We will also be showing a design study of COM Express Type 7 with the Broadwell-DE (Xeon processor). There will also be new IoT gateway products, the SEMA Cloud and products from our latest acquisition Prismtech.