Freescale Achieves Industry-Highest CoreMark™ Performance Score with T4240 Multicore Processor; Announces New T4160 Processor

February 15, 2012, Seoul, Korea — As cloud computing provides processing capabilities for a multitude of services widely used by consumers and enterprises, public and private data centers around the world are rapidly evolving to keep pace with these demands. Advances in virtualization and other processing technologies have enabled data center servers to keep up with performance requirements, and to complement this, embedded multicore communication processors have come to play a major role in managing, classifying, and servicing massive amounts of data both between the cloud and internally.
Freescale, a global leader in communications processors, is supporting innovation in data centers worldwide with its T4240 and T4160 embedded multicore processors from the QorIQ AMP series. The previously announced T4240 processor, based on Freescale's dual-threaded e6500 Power Architecture® cores, provides 24 virtual cores and achieved the best CoreMark benchmark performance profile per watt and overall performance scores in the embedded processor sector. In addition, Freescale today announced the latest software and pin-compatible QorIQ AMP series T4160 processor, which delivers 1.8GHz of performance within a 25W power range with 16 virtual cores.
The T4240 and T4160 products feature an attractive combination of hardware acceleration, fabric-based interconnect technology, high-speed I/O, hardware-assisted virtualization, and next-generation 64-bit Power Architecture cores, making them suitable for data center applications as well as other networking and industrial sectors. Both products are manufactured using 28nm process technology.

The AMP series also uses cascade power management technology to reduce energy consumption using variable mode power switches to meet the strict power efficiency requirements of data centers, enabling customers to freely and precisely adjust the power of cores and other processing units.

The T4240 and T4160 processors incorporate various combinations of advanced technologies optimized for data center applications, as follows.
• Dual-threaded, 64-bit Power Architecture® e6500 core supporting 40-bit physical address memory and 1 TB (terabyte) of physical address memory
• 2nd generation hardware-based hypervisor technology designed to simplify development and enable secure and autonomous operation by allowing multiple individual operating systems to share system resources, including processor cores, accelerators, memory, interconnects, and other on-chip functions.
• 50Gbps packet analysis, classification, and distribution acceleration features
• Supports both 10G and 1G Ethernet, allowing for flexible configuration of multiple 10G and 1G Ethernet interfaces
• 20Gbps IPSEC forwarding performance including SEC (Cryptographic Acceleration Engine) providing 40Gbps performance in SSL and other security protocols
• New 20Gbps DCE (Data Compression Engine), application-aware regular expression pattern matching engine for data loss prevention
• New QoS (Quality of Service) support features, such as Data Center Bridging (DCB) and egress traffic shaping, designed to prevent losses due to queue overflow and enable efficient bandwidth allocation to links.
• Includes SR-IOV supporting high-speed peripheral expansionSupport for system interconnect technologies such as PCIe version 3.0
"Data center technology is evolving at an astonishing pace, and most customers are scrambling to add bandwidth while simultaneously trying to reduce latency through data center network flattening," said Brett Butler, Senior Vice President of Freescale's Networking Processor business unit. "Interestingly, future data centers are beginning to reflect the architecture of Freescale's embedded SoCs, which were developed under the same condition that they must provide the highest network and content processing performance at the lowest cost of ownership. The demands associated with this trend are precisely the traditional strengths of Freescale's communication processors."