Freescale Launches QorIQ AMP Series Embedded Multicore Processors

Freescale (News - Alert) Semiconductor recently announced the launch of the T4240 and T4160 embedded multicore processors from its QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) series. Both these processors will feature 24 virtual cores and are based on the Freescale’s dual threaded e6500 Power Architecture core.  The company is also releasing its latest software- and pin-compatible QorIQ AMP series T4160 processor which will feature 16 virtual cores achieving 1.8 GHz within a 25W power envelope.

In a release, Brett Butler, vice president of Freescale’s Networking Processor (News - Alert) Division, said, “Data center technology is evolving at remarkable speed, and many of our customers are rapidly adding bandwidth while battling latency by flattening the data center network. Interestingly, the data center of the future is beginning to mirror the architecture of our embedded SoCs, driven by the same requirement to deliver the highest network and content processing performance at the lowest cost of ownership. The technology demands associated with this trend are Freescale’s traditional communications processing strengths.”

The T4240 and T4160 processors are suited for data center applications, as they come with a number of advanced technologies such as: dual threaded, 64-bit Power Architecture e6500 cores with 40-bit real address memory and one Terabyte of physical address memory; 50 Gbps of packet parse, classify and distribute acceleration; support for both 10G and 1G Ethernet, allowing the flexibility for multiple 10G and 1G Ethernet interfaces; 20 Gbps of IPSEC forwarding performance, including a crypto acceleration engine (SEC (News - Alert)) with 40 Gbps of performance for SSL and other security protocols and a new 20 Gbps data compression engine (DCE); and a regular expression pattern matching engine for application recognition and data loss prevention.

Eddie Lai, AVP of Business Development for Advantech (News - Alert), said, “Increasingly, our data center equipment customers need open-standard, high-density computing blades for the creation of private and public cloud networks. Their key challenge is to deliver higher traffic processing capabilities within fixed power envelopes as required by the ATCA standard and other specifications. The exceptional performance-per-watt of Freescale’s new QorIQ T4240 processor provides Advantech the ideal platform for creating network services blades capable of delivering double the packet processing per blade.”