Freescale unveils PPC for gaming, home entertainment, networking

Looking to cover all the bases, Freescale Semiconductor unveiled a new PowerPC processor, the MPC7448, targeted at a variety of pervasively connected computing applications, including gaming, home entertainment and networking.

At the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando, Florida, this week, David Perkins, senior vice president and general manager of the networking and computer systems group said that the processor is a response to needs of developers for a high performance processor with a more attractive MIPS per watt specification.

Based on the e600 PowerPC core, the MPC7448 processor is expected to offer speeds from 600MHz to 1.7GHz with system bus running up to 200MHz. Taking advantage of Freescale's 90nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS process, he said the processor can operate at clock rates above one gigahertz at only 10W.

It also supports nap and sleep modes and introduces a dynamic frequency feature that permits software to reduce power consumption "on the fly."

The MPC7448, said Perkins, also takes full advantage of the e600 core's AltiVec a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) engine, which will be particularly useful in networking applications for accelerating security algorithms, networking stack processing, routing and more.

Its powerful DSP capabilities also make it useful for 2D and 3D graphics associated with video playback and recording, static imaging, gaming, Web browsing and e-commerce, including the implementation of CODECs (compression/decompression) algorithms.

The HPC II platform is sampling now, with HPC II hardware design files available now. General platform availability planned for October.

- Bernard Cole

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