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Brings high end PC gaming functionality to defense and aerospace applications Reinforcing the company’s commitment to retaining its leadership in the field of graphics technology in military and aerospace applications, Radstone Embedded Computing today announced Screaming Eagle SE1, a Pentium M-based graphics processor that delivers ‘no compromise’ performance. Designed for the most demanding simulation, embedded training and war gaming applications, Screaming Eagle SE1 is the first graphics card to bring the power, versatility and productivity of high end desktop gaming technology to the VMEbus environment. “Screaming Eagle is designed for customers whose need is for the ultimate in graphics performance,” said Simon Collins, Graphics Product Manager at Radstone Embedded Computing. “It is specifically designed to enable simulation and embedded training applications to be moved out of the training room and into deployable platforms. Radstone’s extensive experience in engineering thermal solutions for state-of-the-art commercial components has allowed us to respond to the increasingly rigorous graphics processing demands of military and aerospace customers.” Many of today’s high profile defense programs – such as Future Combat System (FCS) – foresee a requirement for an embedded training capability to be built in to every platform, allowing maximum personnel productivity and effectiveness. In other programs, the availability of a powerful, on-platform simulator will allow e.g. special forces to simulate a mission, using highly detailed 3D imagery fused from terrain maps, satellite and aerial photography and other field intelligence, immediately prior to undertaking it, enabling the force to more accurately predict likely dangers. Screaming Eagle SE1 is a dual slot 6U VMEbus solution, and features the nVidia GeForce 7800GT graphics processor with 256 megabytes of memory, a Pentium M 760 processor clocked at 2.0 GHz and the Intel 915GM chip set. It also features one gigabyte of main memory and four gigabytes of Flash memory, and supports Windows XP Embedded. Key to its performance is the 16-lane PCI Express interface between the Northbridge and the graphics processing unit (GPU), allowing more vertices and textures to be rendered than would be possible with a less performant bus architecture. Radstone tests indicate a 3DMark 03 (the video and CPU benchmark tool from Futuremark and the preferred benchmark for desktop graphics performance) of 18,336 for Screaming Eagle SE1, and a 3DMark 05 score of 8,120 – indicating a level of performance well beyond that enjoyed by the large majority of today’s PC gamers, and confirming that Screaming Eagle SE1 substantially outperforms any other graphics processor currently available in the VMEbus market. The Intel/Microsoft Windows XP combination also gives defense and aerospace graphics developers access to the broad and deep range of image generator (IG) tools available for the Wintel environment, enabling highly productive, rapid application development.