- Leading company in communications processor field announces new dual-core version
- A combination of abundant accelerators, high-speed interfaces, and advanced security features, along with 2.4GHz performance

May 8, 2012, Seoul, Korea – Freescale Semiconductor (NYSE: FSL, www.freescale.com ) announced two 64-bit multicore QorIQ series control plane processors that deliver 2.4 GHz of single-threaded performance per core. The new quad-core QorIQ P5040 and dual-core P5021 products provide advanced embedded solutions ideal for power-sensitive control plane applications through a combination of powerful accelerators, high-speed interfaces, and security features.

The new products complement Freescale’s previously announced 2GHz core-based QorIQ P5020 and P5010 devices, forming the industry’s most comprehensive family of embedded control plane processors. With the announcement of these new products, Freescale will soon provide a wide range of single, dual, and quad-core 64-bit devices for a broad range of applications, from single-core solutions suitable for products with power requirements of less than 15W to quad-core processors for computationally intensive applications.

All four models of the QorIQ P5 family, based on the Freescale 64-bit Power Architecture e5500 core, are pin- and software compatible. In addition, software reusability has been further expanded with a hybrid 32-bit mode feature that allows for a seamless transition to 64-bit computing while supporting existing software.

"Freescale continues to expand its extensive QorIQ multicore processor family, which has achieved great success, with the new P5040 and P5021 devices," said Bernd Lienhard, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Freescale's Networking Processor business unit. "These new products are designed to enable customers to handle the massive control plane processing demands associated with the rapidly increasing global wired and wireless data while keeping power consumption low."

Both products provide optimal performance per watt and are designed for networking applications, including core routers and data centers, as well as industrial, storage, and military/aerospace sectors. They also feature advanced security capabilities, including secure booting of application code, tamper detection circuitry, secure debugging, and hardware-based acceleration of encryption protocols. Freescale’s Embedded Reliability Architecture, which is key to building highly secure systems, prevents duplicate and unauthorized cores from running in the system.

Since application-specific accelerators and advanced I/O are integrated into a single embedded device, both products offer customers the benefits of shortened system development cycles and reduced thermal management costs. Additionally, processing efficiency is partially optimized through the CoreNet on-chip fabric, which is designed to feed to accelerators and cores while resolving bus competition. RAID 5/6 engines alleviate the load on processor cores during parity calculations for storage applications. The new products integrate support for high-speed connectivity via PCIe, SGMII, XAUI, SATA, Aurora, and multiple 1GigE and 10GigE connections. In addition, double-precision floating-point support has been included to meet the key requirements of the industrial market.

Extensive interconnected systems
Freescale maintains an extensive integration system with internal and third-party software to facilitate product development and shorten time-to-market. 32-bit and 64-bit software solutions will be supplied through Freescale and third-party integration system partners.

Supply situation
Freescale plans to supply initial samples and P5040 development boards in June 2012 and complete final verification of both products in the first quarter of 2013. Further details can be found at www.freescale.com/QorIQ .