Freescale’s Multi-core Communications Platform helps Migration to Multi-core Environments

Freescale unveils the new Multi-core Communications Platform, delivering performance, scale and efficiencies on multi-core software development. The new Multi-core Platform is designed to help developers more easily migrate to multi-core environments while preserving the value of legacy software investments. The move to 45-nm technology for this new multi-core platform enables dramatic performance, integration and power efficiency enhancements designed to outpace Moore’s Law and advance the state of embedded computing.

At the heart of the platform is CoreNet technology, designed to eliminate bus contention, bottlenecks and latency issues associated with shared bus/shared memory architectures that are common in other multi-core approaches. CoreNet technology can seamlessly accommodate more than 32 cores.

The multi-core platform includes an enhanced Power Architecture e500-mc core, targeting a top frequency of 1.5 GHz. It also integrates new data path resource management technology that handles intra-chip message passing and memory buffer reservation. To enable safe and autonomous operation, the platform leverages a hypervisor environment that enables multiple individual operating systems to share system resources, including processor cores, memory and other on-chip functions.

Freescale is working with Virtutech to create a hybrid simulation environment that combines Simics, Virtutech's fast functional technology with a Freescale cycle-accurate model of the platform. This environment is designed to enable developers to quickly switch between models for accurate performance prediction and accelerated development. The Simics environment allows developers to migrate and partition operating systems and applications onto the virtualized multi-core platform well ahead of silicon availability and without real-world hardware constraints. Virtutech offers Freescale customers and partners a virtualized software development platform that provides a controlled, deterministic and fully reversible environment for the development, debugging and benchmarking of software for complex multi-core-based architectures.

Freescale Multi-core Communications Platform is planned to sample in late 2008. A Virtutech simulation environment is now available for Freescale's current generation of multi-core processors, the MPC8572E and the MPC8641D.

More info: Freescale Multi-core Communications Platform