Freescale Now Sampling Eight-Core QorIQ P4080 Processor

Freescale Semiconductor has recently announced that it has started sampling its QorIQ P4080 multicore processor, the flagship model of the QorIQ product family. The new chip has been designed using the efficient 45nm process technology, being the company's fourth solution built on said manufacturing process, which is meant to deliver optimal performance and power efficiency. The eight-core processor has already been selected by a series of early adopters, the company announced, which will incorporate the solution in their upcoming products.

“The P4080 sets a new standard for embedded multicore processing,” said Brett Butler, vice president and general manager for Freescale’s Networking Processor Division. “The device’s early market acceptance underscores its highly advanced architecture and clearly demonstrates Freescale’s commitment to extending its leadership in networking and communications markets.”

According to Freescale, the QorIQ P4080 processor has been designed to deliver new standards of performance, power efficiency, scalability and programmability. It features eight enhanced Power Architecture e500mc cores, each one boasting a dedicated L2 backside cache and having access to a large frontside L3 cache. In addition, the processor has been designed with the ability to boot and reset each individual e500mc core. The cores can be set up to work as eight symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) cores or as eight completely asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) cores. However, they can also be set up to work with a combination of SMP and AMP groupings.

The QorIQ P4080 is designed to provide a choice for a wide range of devices, including switches, enterprise and service provider routers, access and media gateways, base station controllers, radio network controllers (RNCs), and general-purpose embedded computing systems in the networking, telecom, industrial, military and aerospace markets. It comes with high-speed I/O technologies, including dual 10Gbps Ethernet (XAUI) controllers, eight 1Gbps Ethernet (SGMII) controllers, three PCI Express 2.0 controllers/ports, operating at up to 5GHz, and two serial RapidIO 1.2 controllers/ports with speeds of up to 3.125GHz.