ANALOGandDSP - News and Technical Information about Analog and DSP Design

July 2, 2010 -- -NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. today announced the XLP8128S multi-core communications processor that integrates 128 nxCPUs and over 160 programmable processing engines to deliver industry-leading 160Gbps throughput and 240 million packets-per-second (Mpps) of intelligent application performance for next-generation 3G/4G mobile wireless infrastructure, enterprise, storage, security, metro Ethernet, edge and core infrastructure network applications.

The new XLP8128S multi-core processor solution integrates the breakthrough XLP processor architecture to offer unparalleled processing performance with scalability to 128 nxCPUs, each operating at up to 2.0 GHz and based on a best-in-class superscalar engine and out-of-order execution capabilities for converged data plane and control plane processing. The 128 nxCPUs offer full cache and memory coherency over the high-speed Inter-chip Coherency Interface (ICI), enabling software applications to seamlessly run in Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) or Asymmetric Multi Processing (AMP) modes. The unique combination of superior processor cores and scalability from 1 to 128 nxCPUs deliver over 240 Mpps of intelligent application processing performance, making it the industry’s highest performance multi-core communications processors for intelligent Layers 4-7 network, services and application processing.

The XLP8128S features NetLogic Microsystems’ high-speed, low-latency Enhanced Fast Messaging Network to enable efficient, high-bandwidth communication among the 128 nxCPUs and to support billions of in-flight messages and packet descriptors between all on-chip elements. To complement the 128 nxCPUs, the XLP8128S solution offers over 160 fully-autonomous processing engines that provide independent and complete offload of certain network functions from the nxCPUs, including:

160 Gbps fully-autonomous Security Acceleration Engine supporting networking, wireless and storage encryption/decryption/authentication protocols
160 Gbps Network Acceleration Engines for Ingress/Egress Packet Parsing and Management
512 Gbps RAID-5/RAID-6 Acceleration
40 Gbps Compression/Decompression
Packet Ordering
Storage De-Duplication Acceleration
TCP Segmentation Offload
IEEE 1588 Hardware Time Stamping

The XLP8128S multi-core processor offers a tri-level cache architecture with over 50 Mbytes of fully coherent on-chip cache which delivers 40 Terabits/sec of extremely high-speed on-chip memory bandwidth. The XLP8128S solution also incorporates 16 channels of 72-bit DDR3 interconnects yielding an aggregate of over 1600 Gbps of off-chip memory bandwidth, which is 4x the DRAM bandwidth of recently announced competitive solutions. The combination of the 128 nxCPUs with quad-issue and a superior memory sub-system architecture makes the device ideally suited for both data-plane applications that are inherently sensitive to memory latencies as well as control-plane applications that require best-in-class processing performance.

The XLP8128S multi-core processor solution also integrates a wide range of high-speed networking interfaces, including Interlaken, XAUI, SGMII, PCI-Express, USB2.0, and NetLogic Microsystems’ high-bandwidth Inter-chip Coherency Interface (ICI) that provides seamless chip-to-chip cache and memory coherency with full software transparency. The XLP8128S solution is manufactured in TSMC’s advanced 40nm process technology.

NetLogic Microsystems’ multi-core processor family is supported by a comprehensive software development kit (SDK) that contains reference and production-ready software components, which enables customers to accelerate time-to-market.

The XLP8128S solution will sample in the third quarter of 2010 and NetLogic Microsystems is now engaging with early adopters of this technology.

Go to the NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. website for product details.