Typical applications where such PCs are used are:

• CNC and Motion Control
• Robotics and PLC applications
• Medical applications like surgical robots or computer tomographs
• Real-time data acquisition

Regular PCs are designed for standard office use while such industrial applications need hardware which is more suitable to their respective environment: Industrial PCs (IPCs)!

These Industrial PCs fulfil various requirements like mechanical robustness, power consumption, connectivity, storage.
However, some control systems require hard real-time latency predictability while the processors of the x86 architecture today have sophisticated power saving mechanisms which may have serious impact to the requested determinism. These CPUs also have a special protection and correction mode known as system management mode (SMM). This mode is not traceable by the operating system and is a source of unpredictability in the system. Also other features that may be controlled in the BIOS may have an influence to the IPC’s real-time behavior like Hyper Threading or GPU settings.

Thus, one of the IPC selection criteria will be the real-time capabilities of the respective solution.
Especially in the case applications have the need to run the Microsoft Windows operating system in conjunction with a real-time extension or real-time hypervisor software solution, this becomes an important and sometimes challenging selection criteria.
For that purpose, acontis has developed a standard scheme to determine and compare the real-time capabilities of Industrial PCs: https://developer.acontis.com/measurement-setup-7.1.00.01/articles/1027.html.

An excerpt of different IPCs from various vendors have been pre-validated for real-time use.

Appropriate BIOS settings as well as real-time results are published here: https://developer.acontis.com/realtime-support-pre-validated-hardware.html

Contact acontis for more information and help on this topic: info@acontis.com