Freescale multicore processor achieves highest ever CoreMark performance score
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Freescale Semiconductor has announced that it has achieved the industry's highest ever CoreMark performance score with its forthcoming T4240 multicore processor, as well as unveiling a new processor – the T4160.
As part of the company's QorIQ advanced multiprocessing series and based on its dual threaded e6500 power architecture core, the T4240 processor achieved the highest CoreMark benchmark performance per watt profile and overall performance score ever recorded for an embedded processor.
The new software and pin compatible QorIQ AMP series T4160 processor features 16 virtual cores achieving 1.8GHz within a 25W power envelope. According to Freescale, both devices incorporate a combination of hardware acceleration, fabric based interconnect technology, high speed I/O, hardware assisted virtualisation and next generation 64bit power architecture cores with 40bit read address memory and one Terabyte of physical address memory.
Manufactured using 28nm process technology, the processors have been designed for applications in the data centre, as well as other networking and industrial segments. According to Freescale, to meet stringent data centre power efficiency requirements, AMP series products also utilise cascading power management technology, which is an advanced approach that reduces energy consumption using a variable mode power switch. This, says the company, enables users to modulate the power of the cores and other processing units with independence and precision.
The T420 and T4160 processors include an additional range of technologies suitable for data centre applications such as second generation hardware based hypervisor technology, 50Gb/s of packet parse, classify and distribute acceleration; support for both 10G and 1G Ethernet; 20Gb/s of IPSEC forwarding performance; and a new 20Gb/s data compression engine.
"Data centre technology is evolving at remarkable speed, and many of our customers are rapidly adding bandwidth while battling latency by flattening the data centre network," said Brett Butler, vice president of Freescale's Networking Processor Division. "Interestingly, the data centre 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."
Samples of the T4240 and T4160 are planned for mid 2012.