Date: 19/10/2009

New multi-core SoC from AppliedMicro for converged apps

AppliedMicro has introduced the APM 83290, a first member of APM 83K series SoC family, which is a high performance power architecture solution available in bulk CMOS process. The APM 83290 SoC features PacketPro and MultiEase technologies for wireless infrastructure, enterprise, storage, entertainment, multifunction printer and communications applications.

The APM 83290 includes a processor subsystem that integrates two Titan cores based on Power Architecture technology, delivering frequencies of 1.5 GHz per core and provides single thread performance on a per clock basis. The APM 83290 delivers speeds of 1.5 GHz in 90nm bulk CMOS while comparable designs require 45nm SOI process technology to achieve similar operating speeds.

A fundamental component of APM 83290's PacketPro is a message passing architecture that simplifies data movement between the various acceleration blocks and provides Quality of Service guarantees for each flow regardless of the loading from other flows. This Quality of Service is guaranteed via a powerful and flexible Queue Manager and Traffic Manager (QMTM) block. These blocks are fully software programmable in order to support features and provide upgradability for future protocol enhancements.

"Instead of simply throwing extraneous general purpose CPU cores into a chip, we've developed dedicated silicon blocks to offload the most challenging system tasks and ensure that the APM 83K family of SoCs delivers more efficient power/performance ratios for our customers' applications," said Robert Fanfelle, Associate Vice President of Strategic Marketing for AppliedMicro. "PacketPro technology enables efficient packet processing and fair sharing of bandwidth amongst flows allowing our powerful multi-core processor subsystem to concentrate its resources on executing customer applications."

AppliedMicro's MultiEase technology reduces development efforts by providing virtualization of on-chip resources, fault isolation debug and error recovery, and migrate easy developed applications for single core microprocessor systems into a multi-core environment. In addition, the APM 83K series is code compatible with PowerPC products, giving developers the flexibility to leverage their software development efforts and tool sets into new multi-core applications.

"Our customers have put many years into fine tuning and honing their software for single-core environments and they want to preserve their investment yet still take advantage of next generation multi-core processors," Fanfelle said. "With MultiEase, our customers can avoid having to fundamentally redesign their software simply to work in a multi-core shared-resource environment. The customer can ease his transition by controlling the amount of resource sharing and optimization for their particular mix of applications, in turn improving product reliability and time-to-market."

"Converged network applications represent a rapidly growing portion of today's $3.3 billion high-speed embedded processor market," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst of The Linley Group and coauthor of a new report on embedded processors. "AppliedMicro has extensive experience with packet processing, which is a key function for processors in these networking applications. The APM 83K series with PacketPro is
company's best effort yet for combining its embedded processor technology with its networking experience, giving AppliedMicro an advantage in this large and growing market."

The hardware features of the APM 83290 SoC include dual Titan cores, each with a floating point unit, 512KB of shared L2 Cache memory with ECC support, full hardware memory and I/O coherency, 64-bit DDR2 SDRAM interface, security acceleration for IPSec, SSL, Kasumi, SNOW3G and public-key protocols. Other features include a classification engine, multi-channel DMA engine, and high-speed interfaces for Gigabit Ethernet ports, IEEE1588v2 support, PCI Express v2.0, Serial RapidIO, USB and SATA.

Price:
Availability: Now in samples, with production quantities expected in Q1 2010

For more details visit www.appliedmicro.com

Editorial Product Rating: Average