Freescale Highlights Innovation

San Antonio, Texas – Continuing its effort to drive semiconductor innovation, Freescale Semiconductor has announced a new-generation QorIQ multi-core platform—the Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) series. Based on a new multithreaded, 64-bit Power Architecture e6500 core running at up to 2.5GHz, the QorIQ AMP family is expected to deliver 4X the performance of the company’s current family of products at half the power consumption.

During his keynote at the opening of Freescale Technology Forum 2011 here in San Antonio, Texas, Rich Beyer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Freescale, said, “The network challenges over the next five years are very significant. Moore’s Law alone will not keep up with the processing demands and the exponential increase in IP traffic. Multicore solutions are mandatory to delivering on the capabilities these networks require, and these multicore solutions need to balance performance and power consumption.”


Rich Beyer, Freescale Chairman and CEO

Freescale’s QorIQ AMP series, featuring up to 24 virtual cores and built on 28nm process technology, expands on the company’s portfolio based upon the Power Architecture. And speaking of power, Beyer said that Freescale is dealing with the power issue in two ways. First, at the core level, the power management feature of the device enables control of power consumption at the individual core level. For the system level, the application optimized acceleration techniques built into the QorIQ AMP are also delivering power reduction. “Combined, we expect to reduce power consumption of these systems by 50 percent,” noted Beyer.

“Exploding IP traffic rates and the proliferation of smarter, bandwidth-hungry consumer devices are dramatically increasing demands on next-generation networks,” said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Networking & Multimedia Group, in a statement. “Our new QorIQ AMP series delivers the next wave of innovation for networking OEMs through leveraging Freescale’s R&D strength, wealth of IP, and signature intelligent integration.”

Freescale’s first product in the QorIQ AMP series, the T4240 device, integrates a host of hardware accelerators with 12 dual-threaded e6500 cores, providing 24 threads to address high-end data plane processing applications. Dual-threaded efficiency, improved DMIPs per thread and higher frequency deliver 4x performance gain and more than 2x power efficiency gain over the previous-generation QorIQ P4080 device.

Leading the embedded processing revolution
Over the past several years, the world has been entering the era of connected intelligence. The dramatic explosion in number of smart mobile devices; the incredible and insatiable demand for bandwidth; telehealth; distributed intelligence in the whole environment of smart energy; and how the automotive industry is accelerating to “zero”—zero emissions and zero fatalities—are among the trends highlighted by Beyer that will be heavily influenced this connected intelligence.

Beyer noted that embedded processing is the fundamental driver of this new internet of things. “In the past, on what might be referred to as the PC era, we depended upon the processor and very rigid software provided on that processor. We believe that model will not work in the future,” explained Beyer. “We are going to continue to build on our core strengths. We start with solutions based upon embedded processors, applications processors, microcontrollers and digital signal processors. And we integrate those central processing or controlling entities with RF capability, analog, power, sensors, and provide a significant amount of software, [which in turn will] enable customers to bring their products to market more rapidly than they otherwise might be able to do.”

Semiconductor innovation is now at a very important inflection point. The world was about performance in the PC era, and that performance came unfortunately at the expense of power consumption. Beyer stressed that that is no longer acceptable. “In the era of connected intelligence, performance and processing power need to be balanced. We need to have more and more capabilities, but at the same time we need to continually reduce the power consumption,” he said. “We believe that this world will be driven by embedded processing solutions. And these solutions need to be delivered with a system-level view by semiconductor companies.”

Freescale Semiconductor