Date: 15/12/2010

PowerPC core based single/dual core SoC can "Doze," "Nap," "Sleep" and "Deep Sleep"

PowerPC based semiconductor chip vendor Applied Micro Circuits Corporation is sampling the new Mamba single and dual-core embedded processing devices as the first members of its PacketPro System-on-Chip (SoC) family. With the choice of one or two 1.5GHz PowerPC 465 cores, Mamba devices are suitable for multifunction printers, enterprise control planes, consumer NAS systems, wireless access points and industrial applications by offering the industry's most advanced capabilities in power management, security and concurrency.

Intelligent Management Processor inside these chips provide power management, true Asymmetric Multi-Processing (AMP), inline packet processing, look aside hardware offloads, tamper detection and response circuitry.

For energy saving, SLIMpro manages multiple power islands on the SoC and regulates peripherals with Wake on LAN, Wake on USB2.0, Wake on general purpose I/O and Wake on RTC. Additionally, Mamba devices can scale down the frequency of one or both cores into "Doze," "Nap," "Sleep" and "Deep Sleep" states. In "Sleep" state, device operating power can be reduced to less than 1W and "Deep Sleep" state can cut power to as little as 200mW.

"We've designed the PacketPro family to provide developers with greater flexibility to tailor device features for the demanding requirements of next generation systems. Mamba single and dual-core devices are, in fact, the first members of the PacketPro family to provide this advanced flexibility," said Vinay Ravuri, Vice President and General Manager of AppliedMicro's Processor Products Division. "Our close collaboration with tier-1 customers on PacketPro's unique abilities has been instrumental in securing design wins for Mamba prior to silicon availability. This design-win momentum is a testimonial to the differentiation PacketPro brings to our customers."

"Over the next five years, many embedded applications will switch from single-core to dual-core processors to achieve greater performance within existing power budgets," said Linley Gwennap, Principal Analyst for The Linley Group. "To satisfy this ongoing transition, AppliedMicro enters the market with its PacketPro family of single and dual-core devices with the first PowerPC processors manufactured in TSMC's 40-nanometer low-power process. The power-management features of PacketPro offer the flexibility and control of SoC power consumption which designers require in order to raise their systems' energy efficiency."

The other features and specifications of this product as listed by Applied Micro are:

1. Provide true asymmetric multiprocessing where partitions are created on each processing core to run multiple operating systems independently. Each partition has its own on-chip resources for I/O, memory and processing bandwidth and is protected from interference from other partitions. If a partition crashes, recovering reboot starts while other partitions continue to operate normally. Additionally, the concurrency features of Mamba offer unprecedented failover and redundancy within a system by leveraging active and standby modes of operation.

2. The Secure Boot feature of Mamba is fenced off by a cryptographic boundary, allowing manufacturers to store critical security parameters on the SoC to authorize access to a boot loader, associated operating system and applications. This feature, managed by the SLIMpro Trusted Management Module, protects the runtime code from being copied and offers OEMs protection against intellectual property theft and system cloning.

3. AppliedMicro's PacketPro acceleration hardware offloads packet processing functions from the main processor cores to improve system performance. Additionally, Mamba devices support network classification, full security processing, traffic shaping, multi-hop queue management and up to 4 gigabits per second of offload traffic with minimal intervention of the CPUs.

4. AppliedMicro's Mamba APM86190 single-core devices and APM86290 dual-core processors feature up to two 1.5GHz PowerPC 465 processing cores with floating point units, 32 KB I- and 32KB D-cache, 256 KB L2 cache per processor, hardware cache coherency, 1600 Mbps DDR3 memory controller with optional ECC. High-speed interfaces consist of two GE ports with classification and TCP/IP offload, one x4 PCI-Express(R) Gen2, two x1 PCI-e Gen 2 ports, two USB 2.0 hosts with integrated PHYs, one USB 2.0 OTG with integrated PHY and two SATA 2.0 ports.

AppliedMicro 's Serengeti evaluation platform incorporates a dual core APM86290 running up to 1.5GHz and exposes all interfaces available on the SoC. Mamba is supported by an ecosystem of third-party suppliers such as Wind River, VxWorks, Free BSD, Enea, NetBSD and others.

Availability: Now in samples and volumes in second quarter of 2011.
Editorial Product Rating: *** (High Value)