Freescale Details 90nm Dual Core Processor Architecture

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. today unveiled the embedded MPC8641D Dual Core processor designed to deliver a performance jump and increased system bandwidth while keeping power under control.

Engineered to deliver the performance, connectivity and integration needed to meet the needs of

Each e600 PowerPC core was designed to deliver throughput of more than 1.5GHz, doubled when combined. Two 1MByte L2 caches, which is four times more L2 cache than available from the current generation of single-core MPC74xx PowerPC processors, and dual AltiVec vector processing engines provide additional performance. The MPC8641D device is designed to offer all this performance within a 15 watt to 25 watt power range.

The MPC8641D processor offers low-latency access to its dual e600 cores through a high-bandwidth integrated MPX bus designed to scale to 667MHz, for minimized chip-level bottlenecks. As well, the device contains an integrated dual memory controller for low-latency, high-bandwidth access to DDR and DDR2 memories.

A RapidIO serial fabric interface provides the processor with system connectivity, which is ideal for connecting it with peripherals in distributed systems, such as control plane processing, protocol processing and other compute-intensive applications requiring high-speed, peer-level communications with a low pin count.

The MPC8641D processor embeds four Ethernet media access controllers that support 10/100Mbits/sec. and 1Gbits/sec. Ethernet, to accelerate the identification and retrieval of protocols carried over Ethernet, including IPv4, IPv6, Transmission Control Protocol, User Datagram Protocol and Virtual Local Area Network. The MPC8641D also enables local legacy peripheral-to-host connectivity with support for PCI Express interfaces. 

Freescale also disclosed two additional processors based on the e600 PowerPC core: the MPC8641 processor, a pin-for-pin compatible single core implementation of the dual core device; and the MPC7448 discrete processor, a higher-performance, lower-power successor to the MPC7447A PowerPC device, announced in February. Pin-for-pin compatible with the MPC7447A, the MPC7448 processor offers 1MByte of L2 cache and is expected to exceed 1.5GHz.

Each of Freescale’s PowerPC products named above is to be manufactured on the company’s 90nm silicon-on-insulator copper interconnect technology.

Operating system and platform vendors including Enea Embedded Technology, Green Hills Software, Metrowerks, QNX and Wind River have committed their support for the Freescale architecture.