New boards have more processing power and graphics performance

Congatec have launched the new conga-PA5 Pico-ITX single board computer (SBC) and the conga-IA5 Thin Mini-ITX motherboard, two industrial-grade, long-term available computing platforms featuring the latest Intel Atom, Celeron and Pentium processors (Codename Apollo Lake). System engineers can deploy them immediately to upgrade existing Pico-ITX and Mini-ITX designs and benefit from approximately 30% more processing power and 45% more graphics performance compared to the previous generations. With improved performance per watt, they deliver more performance at a given thermal envelope or improve energy consumption and battery life for given performance requirements. Application areas for these new boards are numerous and range from small sized handheld devices, box PCs and IoT gateways to industrial-grade Thin Clients, slim HMIs and low-power GUIs. Typical markets are in smart homes and cities, digital signage and retail, medical technology, gaming and industrial automation, as well as in shop floor and logistic systems. The new motherboards feature impressive security enhancements, improved real-time computing capabilities as well as the ability to keep the embedded systems of IoT devices in sync. This is of great importance for connected applications such as digital video surveillance, vision based robotics, industry 4.0 connected devices, traffic control and smart energy grids, as well as various connected computing nodes on ships, planes, trains, automobiles and more. "With the new boards, the extended temperature range of -40C to +85C is back again on the supported features list. Consequently, all older Bay Trail processor based designs can now switch to the significantly higher performing new processing cores with enhanced feature set. This makes this new generation of motherboards and single board computers far more attractive than its Braswell processor based forerunners," explains Martin Danzer "For IoT designers, the new SIM card socket on our Thin Mini-ITX boards is of particular interest as it enables new and very fast cellular connectivity options with up to several hundreds of Mbit/s and even more with upcoming virtualized 4G/5G networks."