Welcome back to the automation podcast, the world's
number one industrial automation product and technology show.
For those new to the show, my name
is Sean Tierney from Insights, and I wanna
thank you and our entire audience
of automation professionals for tuning back in this
week. Now before we jump into this week's
show, I have a couple of announcements. First
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The team actually interviewed one of the primary
engineers who created the original
Modicon o 84 PLC.
Someone who was on the interview team, I
have to say that was a pretty exciting
experience to talk to somebody who had their
hands in creating that original, especially
somebody who created the, actually, the firmware or
the software for the, that map the IO
to the actual programs and all that. So
I think you guys, if you like this
this series of shows, I think you're gonna
like the history of automation,
series from the Automation Museum, which you can
find today on YouTube. They have their own
channel now. I'll link to it in the
description. And, hopefully, as fundraising,
comes in, we'll be able to expand that
to other platforms as well. So with all
those announcements done, I wanna extend a very
warm welcome
to Manish
from Emerson. He's gonna talk to us about
Emerson's next generation of industrial PCs that are
AI enabled, and what that means is they
have some serious horsepower.
So with that, Manish, I wanna thank you
for coming back well, coming on the show,
and it's great to have Emerson back on
as well. And before we actually jump into
the topic of today's
discussion,
can you take a moment to introduce yourself
to our audience?
Thanks, Sean. Thanks for having me here.
It's a privilege.
My name is Manish Sharma. I'm the global
business development leader for energy and process industries,
which means oil and gas, power,
and chemicals, and so on and so forth.
I'm also,
doing an extra role in the product marketing
for the industrial PCs and a platform called
PACKEDGE,
because they are so relevant to the process
industry and to the discrete industry, and it
goes everywhere.
We'll talk more about it in
in the coming time. And
just,
my background, I have been close to fifteen
years with Amazon. I just got a reward
for that. So yeah. That's a round number,
fifteen years. And before that, I was with
Honeywell for around ten years. So
overall, in automation background,
as a developer, as a designer, as a
software programmer, as a product manager,
as a sales and business development
guy. So, yep,
pretty much all over the place. I have
seen the industries, and I'm excited to be
here and talk to audience about how we
can deploy our industrial PCs and what it
is all about.
Well, I appreciate you for coming on. And
you're gonna say, Emerson has this phenomenal line
of products that fit directly into the industrial
automation space, and we've covered PAC systems and
and, some of the other products in the
previous shows, especially on the, the old automation
news show we were doing for a few
years. But,
so I'm excited to learn more because that's
not my background. And so, please go ahead
and jump right into your presentation to bring
us up to speed on these new industrial
PECs.
So industrial PCs have been with us for
quite some time. We decided to refresh,
to a new generation of industrial PCs,
and give it a wider range.
So the earlier we are not going to
talk about the earlier IPCs here, but we
are going to talk about the ones that
are based upon,
the new generation of chips that Intel is
making. And we call it Raptor Lake series.
Let's
go into the details of what exactly I'm
talking about.
I don't want to, you know, tell the
audience about the challenges and why IPC should
be used, although
there is a whole host of discussion that
we can have around that.
So these are the three IPCs that we
are going to talk about.
Sixty ten, seventy ten, and 8010.
And they are based upon they're designed around,
you know, what the customer needs. If a
customer needs sufficient and a and a strong
IPC,
you they can always go for sixty ten,
and there is a wide range of
chips that,
they host.
The balanced one is somewhere between the performance
and the efficiency, seventy ten.
And if a customer want top notch performance,
their processing needs are very high, and they
want
more work power to be done by a
single IPC. They can always go for eighty
ten.
Just a brief overview of what it all
entails.
So first of all,
you don't really need to have a fan.
We will come into that. These,
IPCs are self cooling. They don't really need
a fan to cool down. But if you
really want it, depending upon where you are
locating them, if they are
going to exceed the temperature band, which we
can support, you can always put an optional
fan.
It's got all the ports that you need,
Ethernet ports, four of them.
And, you can have,
different PCI slots and extension
to these.
The hard disk is SSD based. There are
ramps. There are nonvolatile
ramp that you can put into that.
You see this power, 24 volt DC, so
that's what you feed into it. There is
another product of Amazon which you can use
it for power supply, but we'll not get
into that. The business name is Solar HD.
You can use that.
So here is what audience might be interested
in. It's a fanless design, so no moving
parts.
That reduces,
you know, point of failure.
Direct thermal cooling of all components, it's a
single PCB.
The temperature range is minus 40 degrees centigrade
to 70 degrees centigrade. So you can imagine
it can go out in deserts, it can
go out in mining applications
on top of, you know, the rotating equipments
that are out there, the,
shovels and the trucks and so on and
so forth.
On the coal side, it can actually operate
at minus 40, which means the pipelines, the
oil and gas pipelines that are in the
remote regions flowing around, the water pipelines, so
on and so forth.
High shock and vibration tolerance, which means
on military equipments,
the tanks,
the, you know, the aircrafts,
anything that vibrates,
and you need
a good product with the shock vibration.
Maintenance free, obviously, and extended
availability
for for a long time.
You know, I wanna just jump in here
for those who are listening.
This is a very impressive, I think, smaller
form factor industrial PC.
You know, you were talking about Manish about
the, direct thermal cooling, and this thing has,
for those of you who are listening, it's
the the case looks like it's made out
of two it's two big heat sinks. Right?
So on the bottom and on the top,
we have these these, this case that's a
heat sink. And then on one side, we
have all our connectivity ports. We have Ethernet
ports. We have USB three. We have
USB c. We have all these different ports,
which is we we we, we showed on
the other slides. And then we also have,
on another side, we have the power port,
other ports as well. And if you needed
to get to the highest range,
there's even the port for the fan, which
you had mentioned. So I thought it was
very interesting. I'm really impressed with
the size of, these systems
and,
you know, just the temperature range. Minus 40
to 70 c, that's a very wide temperature
range. So let me, go ahead and pitch
it back to you. And, Sean, for highlighting
that, it actually is a heat sink. The
whole design is a heat sink. You can
hold it in one hand, and, obviously, it's
a little bit bigger than one hand. No
fan needed to cool it. You can always
put a fan if you need to. And
as you said, the wide operating temperature in
the whole design of the heat sink actually
enables it to operate at a very, very
wide temperature range. And it's
I we talked about the high shock and
vibration tolerance, but it's a beautiful product to
look at. All kind of ports, as I
said, USB ports, USB c port,
USB a.
LEDs are there, which, for different functions, like
whether you're connected to Wi Fi, whether there
is an error message. So those are the
standard stuff in any control system,
product. And I have to agree with that,
Manish. And at this point in this show,
we need to stop and pay a few
bills with a sponsored message. This one from
the automationschool.com
where they are hard at work at updating
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And so with that, let's go ahead and
jump right back into your presentation manage and
learn more about these MSN IPCs.
So
what can we do
in addition to just a single IPC? We
can extend it to four PCI slots, which
means
any device that can fit onto a PCI
slot
can be put into this. And at the
end of the day, let's remember,
industrial PC is a PC. So once you
put a device in, it is recognized, you
can add the functionality.
The operating system and the application will basically
work with the devices that you are add
on to the PCI slots, and,
that's going to be the new added functionality.
So what I'm trying to say here is
an IPC's functionality
can be extended
by the components that you can insert into
the PCI slots, and that's where our AI
enablement comes into picture, which we are going
to talk about soon. Well, I think this
is important because
the base PC is so small,
but you give the option by adding these
additional
modules to add those additional,
PCI slots. So it's excellent. If you didn't
need anything extra, if you need it in,
USB was great. Everything you had built in
was great. You can just buy that base
unit, but you can slap on each of
those modules. And those modules, they're not a
set as a PCI card. There's some extra
electronics in there, but they've that you have
the ability to add up to four of
those. That's pretty impressive.
Yep.
And,
if you want to, for example, extend your
SSD capability, nowadays, a lot of people Mhmm.
Are,
you know, expanding it to, let's say, eight
terabytes.
You can actually
add the memory. You can add sorry. You
can add the SSDs.
You can add you can add the AI
chips, which we'll talk about the NPU chips,
and you can actually make it a beast.
For most of the people, you don't even
need to do that. But there are some
there are some needs and there are some
application and there are some customers who would
extend this box. I cannot talk about what
we are currently doing, but we are deploying
it in a very
one of the oil and gas majors with
all the expansion slots,
the AI modules, the SSDs.
Every one of them is going to be,
you know, a powerhouse. They are going to
use it for,
capturing
the camera frame grabs and then analyzing it
using computer vision algorithms and so on and
so forth so that they can detect
what exactly is going on with the flame
flares and so on and so forth.
This is confidential at this point of time,
the name of the customer and application, but
this is a typical application
that we do all
the time. So the the point I'm trying
to highlight here is that you can do
a lot with a bare IPC, and you
can do a lot more with the expansion
slots.
Regarding certifications,
so we got
a whole list of certifications. We got safety
certification, UL certification.
One of the things that I would like
to highlight is ATEX certification.
Again, these certifications are
different regions have different needs of certification,
but many of them are standard across the
world. So, yes,
marine certification
is under progress.
It's expected to come March 2026.
But we we got marine deployments
already going on and even in the past.
So as I said, this is a new,
this is a new range of IPC,
but we have had IPCs before. They are
used in semiconductor
industry,
in power industry, in windmills, and so on
and so forth. So that business continues. This
is just an extension. So we are extending
the certifications that used to exist on older
product lines onto the new product lines.
I just want to again,
reiterate the message.
We got three Raptor Lake product line,
IPC sixty
ten, IPC seventy ten, IPC eighty ten.
What we have
and,
this is something, you know, the sixty ten,
seventy ten, 80 tens are the workhorse. They
go from
a power 15 watt,
28 watt, and 48 watt respectively,
for sixty, seventy, and 80.
But what we have is another micro
IPC,
which is IPC twenty ten.
It's got four watt
of,
power usage.
The maximum frequency
is, like, 1.2 gigawatt. It's got two course.
And it's always been under, you know, that
we are going to extend it, and we
did as well. So we got more course
as well. But here, we'll talk about what
we have.
Where is it used?
It's it's a very small
plug and play kind of an IPC. You
for example, you got
you got, say,
few 100 devices
in a plant, and they are talking in
different protocols. You can use this
as a broker or as a proxy,
to bring all the devices together. It's a
mini IPC. It can do the IPC's job,
but mostly it would be great if you
use it as, you know, an aggregator.
So it's it's cheap. It holds the software,
which the other
big brothers use, the IPC sixty ten seventy
ten eighty ten. And there is something called
Movicon Connex.
So Movicon Connex can be loaded on it,
and it can bring all the devices together
because MovieConn connects is fundamentally
a a protocol aggregator.
So different devices on different protocols,
they can all, you know, talk to this
IPC twenty ten. It can help bring
a disparate
device environment
into a unified,
communication,
environment.
So,
this IPC twenty ten, and we will not
dwell more into it, but I wanted to
kind of make a point that we got
an IPC which can be used as a
data concentrator, as a data aggregator,
and
it's easy to use, then rail mounted.
It's got WiFi.
It's got cellular.
It has been used in remote locations,
where you just have the cellular signal. Every
week, you can store and forward the data
and so on and so forth. And the
best part, the operating temperature range is minus
40 degrees centigrade up to 70 degrees centigrade.
So it is target.
That's one of those product lines which
which is easy to use. Just mount it,
and it can solve a lot of problems.
Well, that chart really does do a good
job showing all the features and functions of
each of the models. And it looks like
at this point, we have another sponsored message.
This one from Insights and Automation,
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or you can click on the join button
on our YouTube channel. And with that, Manish,
let's go ahead and dive back into your
presentation.
This visual that I'm showing
is better seen, but I will try to
verbalize it as much as possible. So what
does this IPC contain? Alright? What are the
options? So first of all, it's got three
classes of, you know,
CPUs.
And that makes the series sixty ten, seventy
ten, and eighty ten. There is a range
of IPC there is a range of processors,
which makes it a 60.
There is a range of processors, which make
it 70, and then there is another range,
which makes it 80. That's the the type
of processor decides
what's going to be the IPC range.
Then you can have a RAM range.
What kind of RAM do you want?
Not the kind, the size.
So
it uses DDR five RAMs.
The lowest one is four, then you can
add eight
or sixteen thirty two sixty four. So you
have five different choices of RAM size.
Four, eight, sixteen, thirty two, 64.
Then,
you have MRAM. So you can choose your
IPC not to have an MRAM, or you
can
have,
eight MB of MRAM.
SSD sizes, you can choose not to have
an SSD.
You can start with a one twenty eight
GB SSD
all the way till four terabyte SSD. And
I talked about it. You can extend it
using the extension slots. So the customers have
actually asked for an eight terabyte. We can
put that as well, or you can use
the extensions.
Operating system. That's that's like a big one.
So you can again order it without an
OS.
You can have a Windows ten
twenty twenty one version. You can have a
Windows eleven twenty twenty four version.
You can have Linux.
So now Windows and Linux are done. Then
we have
a software package and what I would like
to call an execution environment system called package.
PACK Edge works on top of Linux.
So
it can host your application. It's got containers
and dockers and,
you know, Grafana node that you can do
all the programming,
that you need. You can you can create
dashboards, visuals. You can connect to the cloud,
so on and so forth. Package is a
different subject on its own. But what I'm
trying to tell you is that our environment,
which manages
what you
do on the Linux, is package.
You can do your own thing. You don't
need a package. But package provides a lot
of added functionalities,
you know, from a cybersecurity
point of view, from from what you
do with the Grafana or Node RED applications
and so on and so forth.
You can load MovieCon Next. MovieCon Next is
the scale up platform, which Amazon has. So
you can load it on top of this,
IPC if you use Windows,
and,
then you can have a full fledged
SCADA server in that sense, if you will.
You can you can always use a Dell,
PC for that, but you can always use
an IPC as well. And the benefits of
IPC, as I said, you can put it
in remote location. It can be on the
moving machines and so on and so forth,
along with, obviously, the temperature range that it
provides.
Then I talked about package.
There are other options with package. You want
package with connects. Connect, as I said, is
a data aggregator and a protocol converter or
a protocol aggregator.
You can have
package with, connects and web HMI. You can
have package with group manager.
So group manager is
our software,
which
think of it as a fleet manager.
Let's assume my cons customer has 500 IPCs,
deployed across the plant. Now you want to
push upgrades, you want to manage all these
500 assets, and so on and so forth.
You need
a kind of a class monitor. Right?
The one that manages the class. Group manager
is that
is that functionality.
You can manage different devices.
You can push updates. You can
you can do a lot of things with
group manager without going into details. So group
manager, again, has got different functions, like how
many devices can it manage. So depending upon
the license,
you can you can go up to 500
devices.
Then beyond 500 devices,
we may come up with a thousand devices
group manager as well, or we can ask
the customers,
hey, put another IPC
for managing more devices. So you can have
multiple group managers.
You can have multiple group managers even now.
You can have 500 devices
and choose to have
two group managers managing two fifty devices each.
So that's how it depends upon application, depends
upon customer,
depends upon the configuration where IPCs exist.
You want to segregate them into different zones,
so on and so forth. So there are
multiple logics to it.
Then,
you got add in modules. So you can
have the AI module which we talked about.
You can have Wi Fi capability. You can
have NV RAM,
and, you can have a combination of all
the three.
You know, for the audio audience, one of
the things I found interesting about this chart,
which I think was well done,
is that,
you know, the the we have the sixty
ten, the seventy ten, the eighty ten. But
even in the sixty ten, we have our
choice between an I three, I five, and
I seven.
And I like that you listed on the
chart the processor type, so thirteenth gen, like,
60 thirteen sixty five UE.
So those of us who follow the Intel
chipset, the Intel chipsets
are are familiar with those numbers. And, also,
that you've listed the,
number of,
power cores versus efficiency cores.
So, I think at a glance here, you
can definitely see as you go down the
list, of course, you get much more power.
You get more power cores. You get higher
the number of this the the CPU, the
Intel chip goes up, which means you're getting
a higher speed of CPU as well. So,
I really appreciate that type of detail being
put on the,
being put on this selection guide.
Thanks.
Thanks, Sean. Yep. You brought a very important
point.
You don't really have to go all the
way till 8010 to basically get the efficiency.
If your needs are limited,
even if 15 watt,
sixty ten,
IPC can be configured using I three, I
five, or I seven depending upon what you
really want.
Great point.
With that,
any questions?
No. I think, you know, one of the
best ways to end this presentation I really
appreciate you coming on and talking to us
about these different IPCs.
I learned a lot myself. But I think,
you know, let's end by, reminding
the audience where they can find out more
information.
And then if they you know, I don't
know if there was a contact link on
that website
or where they could go to like, let's
say they wanna ask some questions or,
you know, talk to somebody. Who would they
go to at that point? So let me
turn it back to you. We can,
kind of talk about the configuration page that
lets you see the quick ship parts that
lets you,
configure your own IPC, has links to all
the different documents and everything.
And, probably just the easiest guys to, you
know, like,
manage shed is to, you know, just
search on the net for, you know, IPC
sixty ten, seventy ten, eighty ten,
and then you'll get to that you Emerson
web page there. And then,
what if they alright. So they see it.
They like it. They know it.
There's a button on that screen, contact sales.
So I'll I'll just turn it back to
you to finish up here.
The best way to reach us is
to reach me, Manish dot Sharma, manish,.sharma@therateamazon.com.
But yeah. I mean, you can always lose
that info. So
contact sales,
is one way of doing it. You you
Google the Amazon
IPC
601070108010,
whichever one. Pick your number.
You know, you will reach a landing page.
So
there are two things you can do. You
can do a contact sales,
information there. There is a form that you
will need to fill,
and then we will contact you back.
There is if you if you don't need
to just contact it and you want to
basically play around with, there is a button
called setup. So
or configure depending upon these web pages keep
on refreshing, so don't take my word for
the setup. But there will always be a
button
which will basically take you to configure it.
And once you once you do the configurator
setting, for example,
for people who are seeing this, that's fine.
But for people who are not seeing, you
can choose the processor.
You can choose the extension slots.
You can choose the RAM, how much do
you want. You can choose the SSD,
what do you need.
Then you can choose
the hardware modules, like,
whether you need a Wi Fi module, AI
module, or MB RAM module,
and then you can choose which OS do
you want. Do you want Windows or do
you want Linux?
I'm choosing Linux here. And then if I
choose package, then it will, by default, choose
Linux because package runs only on Linux.
Then you can
choose, you know, whether you're you want a
thin rail or you want,
whether you want a fan necessary or not.
And depending upon what you choose, it's going
to give you a part number. What you
what IPC you created out of the 50,000
IPCs that we were talking about.
And then what exactly else do you need?
This RPF one twenty is the part number
of the fan which I chose, and there
are expansion slots and so on and so
forth.
And it will
give you a configuration
document. You can mail it to yourself.
For example, I'm mailing it to myself here.
Alright?
You can mail it to yourself. You can
mail it to your friend or anybody. And
then you can always contact us,
to basically talk about, you know, just, hey.
This is the configuration that I need.
There are different distributors in different regions,
which you can get in touch with. But
the best way to do is you should
contact sales,
contact support.
There are different contact us buttons that are
available on the site.
The one on the pack system landing page
will eventually reach us, so feel free to
contact us using that. And my number is
always there.
My email ID, which I talked about,
Manish.Sharma@Emerson.com.
I'll be more than happy to, you know,
close the loop on this if you feel
lost on the contact as well.
Yeah. And I appreciate you going through that.
So, guys,
let us know what you think about this
week's episode. What if especially if you're watching.
Do you agree with my, you know, kinda
characterization?
I mean, this looks like a slick new
line,
very well designed, expandable. So I'd love to
hear from the audience what you guys think.
Of course, I wanna thank, Manish for coming
back on the show. I wanna thank all
of you in the audience for tuning back
into this week. I also wanna thank our
sponsors
who make it possible for us to continue
to bring you this show, including the automationschool.com.
If you know anybody looking for POC HMI
or skater training, please consider mentioning this week's
sponsor, the automationschool.com,
in appreciation for their support. I also wanna
thank all our paid subscribers. As you guys
know, you will get access to special editions
of this episode
as part of your membership. That said, Manish,
thank you again for coming on the show.
Really appreciate it. Thanks, Sean. Thanks for having
me. And I wanna wish everybody in the
audience good health and happiness. And until next
time, my friends.
Peace.