Applied Micro Circuits
Corporation (NASDAQ:AMCC), or AppliedMicro, a global leader in energy conscious
computing and communications solutions, today announced the first member of
its APM 83K series System on Chip (SoC) family: APM 83290 - the highest performance
Power Architecture® solution available in bulk CMOS process. Designed from
the ground-up to achieve industry leading speeds comparable to designs manufactured
in expensive Silicon-on-Insulator processes, the APM 83290 SoC provides a level
of price flexibility that makes it attractive to a wider range of systems. The
APM 83290 also features proprietary PacketPro™ and MultiEase™ technologies
developed from AppliedMicro's extensive networking and processing experience
for a device that delivers the best performance 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. The Titan core is a superscalar, dual-issue, out-of-order core designed
to achieve industry leading single thread performance on a per clock basis.
Along with high performance, innovative circuit design techniques enable the
APM 83290 to deliver speeds of 1.5 GHz in 90nm bulk CMOS while comparable designs
require 45nm SOI process technology to achieve similar operating speeds. This
combination of performance and price flexibility makes this solution attractive
for many low cost application areas that traditionally were not serviced by
Power Architecture products.
The APM 83290's PacketPro consists of a number of acceleration blocks
designed to offload the processor subsystem from commonly occurring tasks in
networking applications. A fundamental component of 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. Instead of using
isolated operation offloads, the acceleration blocks are designed to offload
entire protocol level tasks in order to reduce processing overhead and increase
application performance. These blocks are fully software programmable in order
to support proprietary 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 allows customers to reduce
development efforts and accelerate their time to market schedules by providing
virtualization of on-chip resources, fault isolation debug and error recovery.
This allows customers to easily migrate applications originally developed 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.
Posted October 16th, 2009
