The AMP (Advanced Multiprocessing) series of embedded communications processors is made up of the next-generation of Freescale's QorIQ multicore series. The processors incorporate a mulit-threaded 64bit Power Architecture core, a 28nm process technology, up to 24 virtual cores, acceleration engines and power management. All combine, claims the company, to deliver up to four times the performance of the company's previous-generation eight-core QorIQ P4080. The processors include control and data plane processors ranging from cost-effective, low-power single-core products, to advanced SoCs, targeting demanding networking, industrial and military/aerospace applications. The processors are designed to meet the expected increase in IP traffic, predicted by Cisco to quadruple and to reach 966exabyte/year by 2015. They also meet the requirements of industrial robotics, storage, medical and video systems, says the company. The e6500 core runs at up to 2.5GHz and incorporates an enhanced version of the widely adopted AltiVec vector processing unit. This addresses high-bandwidth data processing and algorithmic-intensive computations. The acceleration engines and co-processing technologies include enhanced security, pattern matching and compress/decompress engines, as well as the company's data path acceleration technology. Compression/decompression technology provides 20Gbit/s performance. There is also a new SEC 5.0 crypto accelerator which offloads protocol processing, including LTE, IPSec, and SSL, at up to 40Gbit/s while delivering nearly 140Gbit/s of raw crypto hardware acceleration for current and emerging wireless and wireline algorithms. Other acceleration technologies, according to the company, support regex acceleration, 128bit SIMD data pre-fetching, in-line parsing and classification. The processors also have CoreNet interconnect fabric, a cache-coherent memory hierarchy, hardware-based virtualisation for optimal performance and dynamic on-chip debug for visibility into complex software processes. For power management, a variable-mode power switch allows customers to modulate the power of the cores and other processing units independently.
