Freescale has begun shipping its MPC8641D dual-core device based on Power Architecture technology.
Freescale has begun shipping its MPC8641D dual-core device based on Power Architecture technology, and showcased its capabilities this week at the second annual Multicore Expo Conference and Exhibition. Recently released benchmark results from the embedded microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) show that the MPC8641D performed exceptionally well in a host of tests specific to embedded infrastructure and other applications. The EEMBC-certified benchmark scores are conducted to help designers predict device performance in a range of real-world applications.
Detailed score reports are available free of charge on the EEMBC website.
'The performance of Freescale's MPC8641D device, as demonstrated by a number of recent EEMBC tests, provides further reinforcement of the value of the Power Architecture', said Markus Levy, President of EEMBC.
'These new EEMBC results for the MPC8641D are only the latest in a long list of certified scores provided by Freescale to make its customers aware of the performance characteristics of its offerings'.
Built using e600 Power Architecture cores and leveraging the PowerQUICC system-on-chip (SoC) platform, Freescale's MPC8641D dual-core processor is engineered to deliver breakthrough performance, connectivity and integration for embedded networking, telecomms, military, storage and pervasive computing applications.
The strength of the device is its integration, which translates into smaller boards and higher processing density.
With dual-core performance and integrated northbridge and southbridge functionality, this single chip can replace what could take up to four chips using other solutions.
Additionally, all core-to-peripheral connections are internal, so board designers avoid difficulties related to laying out high-speed parallel buses.
The MPC8641D features two e600 cores operating at up to 1.5GHz - the highest performing cores in Freescale's portfolio today.
Each has its own ECC-protected 1Mbyte backside L2 cache to circumvent 'cache thrashing' issues.
The per-core AltiVec 128bit vector processing engines commonly achieve a 2-12x performance increase as demonstrated by EEMBC benchmarks.
Peripherals are derived from the field-proven PowerQUICC communication processor family, allowing for significant software reuse across Freescale product lines.
Samples of the MPC8641D and its evaluation board are available now.
