Date: 02/08/2011

2 GHz, 16 CPU multicore processor from NetLogic packs efficient bus interfaces

NetLogic Microsystems has made available the XLP316T multi-core processor optimized for the storage-area networking (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) markets in data center, enterprise and small-to-midsize business (SMB) networks.

XLP316T processor integrates 16 NXCPUs operating at up to 2.0 GHz. The XLP316T processor offers features such as RAID 5 and RAID 6 hardware acceleration, storage de-duplication acceleration, high-speed Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces and large on-chip L3 cache.

"We are extremely excited about the strong momentum of our flagship XLP multi-core processor family into networking, LTE wireless and security markets, and are pleased to now expand our addressable market into storage appliances and network storage systems," said Chris O'Reilly, vice president of marketing at NetLogic Microsystems. "Having the industry's first and only quad-issue, quad-threaded multi-core processor with out-of-order execution in 40nm puts us a generation ahead of competitive solutions."

"The network-storage market represents a huge expansion of the market opportunity for NetLogic Microsystems' XLP processors," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group and editor-in-chief of Microprocessor Report. "We are impressed to see the company introduce several innovative multi-core processors targeting high-growth segments - LTE base stations, LTE enhanced packet core, security appliances, control-plane processing and now network storage - all in the last nine months."

To complement the 16 NXCPUs, the XLP316T multi-core processor offers fully-autonomous processing engines that provide independent and complete offload of certain network and storage functions from the NXCPUs, including:
64 Gbps RAID-5/RAID-6 hardware acceleration
Storage De-Duplication hardware acceleration
10 Gbps Security Acceleration Engines supporting encryption, decryption and authentication protocols for networking, wireless and storage applications
20 Gbps Network Acceleration Engines for ingress/egress packet parsing and management
Packet Ordering Engines supporting 32k flows
TCP Segmentation Offload Engines
IEEE 1588 Hardware Time Stamping hardware acceleration

Netlogic says the XLP316T multi-core processor features NetLogic Microsystems' high-speed, low-latency Enhanced Fast Messaging Network to enable efficient, high-bandwidth communications among the 16 NXCPUs and to support billions of in-flight messages and packet descriptors among all the on-chip elements. The XLP316T processor offers tri-level cache architecture with more than 6 Megabytes of fully coherent on-chip cache, which delivers 40 Terabits per second of extremely high-speed on-chip memory bandwidth. The XLP316T processor also incorporates two channels of 72-bit DDR3 interconnect that yields over 200 Gigabits per second of off-chip memory bandwidth.

The XLP316T processor also integrates a wide range of high-speed interfaces, including:
Serial ATA (4x)
PCI-Express Gen2 (2x8 or 4x4 or 1x4 configurations)
10 Gigabit Ethernet XAUI (2 ports)
Gigabit Ethernet SGMII (8 lanes)
USB2.0 (4x)

For more info visit www.netlogicmicro.com