Meinberg announced yesterday that they now offer a PCI express version of their GPS time synchronization card. It is called GPS170PEX and can be used for taking highly accurate time stamps from within your own application (e.g. a data aquisition app oder measurement software) and/or represents a satellite radio clock which NTP uses to keep your system time in sync with the rest of the world.
Since more and more server boards and even desktop computers come with fewer and fewer PCI (or PCI-X for that matter) slots, a few people might be interested in using one of the x1 PCIe slots for their time source.
The nice thing about the Meinberg slot cards is that you need only one driver for all their bus level products, that means you install one driver and it supports all ISA, PCI, PCI-X, PCI Express and even USB devices that Meinberg offers and has offered in the past.
I was told (by a reliable source :-)) that the new GPS170PEX will support direct memory mapped access to the time stamp with one of the next driver versions. This greatly enhances the ability to read a lot of time stamps in a short time and seems like a useful addition especially for those people who have to timestamp thousands of events per second.
We will see how fast this one will take off.
