28nm multicore platform touts up to 24 virtual cores

The Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) series is touted to include innovative acceleration engines and sophisticated power management system that deliver performance and power efficiency. It is software-compatible with the PowerQUICC and QorIQ product families and has extensive development support including the CodeWarrior development suite and a rich third-party ecosystem for operating systems, tools and application software.

The QorIQ AMP series delivers up to 4x the performance of the previous-generation eight-core QorIQ P4080 device. Freelance noted that the AMP series will include a broad array of next-generation control and data plane processors scaling from cost-effective, ultra-low-power single-core products, up to advanced SoCs targeting the most demanding networking applications.

The AMP series is designed to help network equipment OEMs and service providers meet challenging power and performance requirements driven by a worldwide explosion of network endpoints and associated IP traffic, Freescale said. The AMP series address networking challenges, as well as the stringent requirements of other markets including the military/aerospace, industrial, robotics, storage, medical, video systems and printing spaces, the company added.

The foundation of Freescale's QorIQ AMP series is the multithreaded, 64bit power architecture e6500 core running at up to 2.5GHz. The e6500 core incorporates an enhanced version of the AltiVec vector processing unit. The AltiVec technology addresses high-bandwidth data processing and algorithmic-intensive computations, delivering DSP-level performance and other benefits for its customers, noted Freescale.

Complementing the programmable e6500 cores is a broad range of highly advanced acceleration engines and co-processing technologies, including enhanced security, pattern matching and compress/decompress engines, as well as Freescale's data path acceleration (DPAA) technology. The AMP series' compression/decompression technology provides 20Gbps of performance, and an SEC 5.0 crypto accelerator offloads protocol processing, including LTE, IPSec, and SSL, at up to 40Gbps while delivering nearly 140Gbps of raw crypto hardware acceleration for current and emerging wireless and wireline algorithms. Other acceleration/offload technologies are incorporated to support regex acceleration, 128bit SIMD data prefetching, in-line parsing and classification, and quality of service functionalities.

The AMP series also incorporates CoreNet interconnect fabric, a cache-coherent memory hierarchy, hardware-based virtualization and dynamic on-chip debug technology that provides deep visibility into complex software processes.

Freescale's first product in the QorIQ AMP series, the T4240 device, integrates a host of hardware accelerators with 12 dual-threaded e6500 cores, providing 24 threads to address high-end data plane processing applications. Dual-threaded efficiency, improved DMIPs per thread and higher frequency deliver 4x performance gain and more than 2x power efficiency gain over the previous-generation QorIQ P4080 device, the company said. Advanced capabilities allow for intelligent sharing and duplication of resources between threads and a larger amount of on-die cache per core. Application examples for the T4240 device include metro carrier edge routers, access gateways and aerospace/defense products. Freescale will provide more details regarding the T4240 product later this year. The device is planned for initial availability in early 2012.

Development tools for the AMP series are will be available starting 1Q12.