Editor: Linley
Gwennap In This Issue
Save the date! Mark your calendars for July 21 when The Linley Group, Freescale, Wintegra, and AMCC host a free one-day seminar on Access System Design. The event will be held at the Santa Clara Marriott hotel. Watch for the detailed program to be announced soon. For further information, visit our web site. Agere Samples Third-Generation OC-48 NPU Last week, Agere announced the APP650, a new OC-48 network processor. Although the APP650 offers the same throughput and level of integration as Agere's existing APP550, the new NPU offers major performance and feature improvements. For edge-router applications, the most significant change in the APP650 is doubled classification performance. Agere borrowed the classification-engine design from its discontinued APP750 10Gbps NPU, which used three pattern engines, versus the APP550's single engine. Agere maintained pin compatibility with the APP550 by adding internal tree memories to the APP650, which avoided the need for additional external memory. The other major architectural change to the APP650 is the addition of a second stream editor. Whereas the existing stream editor modified packets on egress, the new stream editor modifies packets before queuing. This added capability enables the APP650 to handle new protocols, most notably AAL2, without an external coprocessor. Agere has also added a second shaping engine to the its NPU, doubling the cycle budget for traffic shaping. The added performance and features have a cost; Agere estimates that the APP650 will dissipate 20–30% more power than the APP550. The APP650 is also priced at $596 in 10K quantities, nearly 10% more than the APP550. Samples of the APP650 are available now. Agere's announcement of the APP650 comes on the heels of the new APP300 NPU for access designs, which is also now sampling. We expect the APP650 to replace the APP550 for most new OC-48 designs, while the APP300 family serves the more price-sensitive GbE/OC-12 performance point. With APP550 volume on the rise and two new NPUs sampling, Agere is well positioned to gain share in multiservice designs. —BW Complete coverage of Agere's APP family appears in our report A Guide to Network Processors.
Fortunately, Freescale no longer uses the CPUs from its 744x line in its most of its popular PowerQUICC products. The e600 (G4) CPU from the 744x dissipates too much power for most embedded applications, so Freescale developed the e500, which delivers slightly less performance but uses much less power, for PowerQUICC. Without Apple’s funding, we expect Freescale to focus on processors that provide a balance between performance and power dissipation rather than very high-performance products. We also expect Freescale to redirect development of the e700, a 64-bit PowerPC CPU intended to compete with IBM’s G5 CPU, to better meet the demands of the embedded market, which is likely to further delay the project. With Freescale unable to deliver a G5-class product in 2005, Apple has been forced to rely on IBM, but that company has become less and less interested in developing standard products. Over the past two years, IBM has sold its network processor, switch fabric, TCAM, and integrated PowerPC products, leaving only the standalone processors that it sells to Apple and a few others. But apparently even the estimated $250 million that IBM received from Apple in 2004 was not enough to keep Big Blue's attention. Apple's decision should allow IBM to drop the final vestiges of its standard-product business, letting it focus entirely on video-game manufacturers and its other large ASIC customers. By the way, anyone who believes IBM will be selling Cell processors to hundreds of customers in a few years just isn't paying attention. —LG Complete coverage of Freescale and IBM PowerPC processors appears in our report A Guide to High-Speed Embedded Processors. The 82573E integrates a single-lane (x1) PCI Express 1.0a interface, a MAC with 32KB FIFO, and a 10/100/1000 PHY. The new chip also integrates a processor capable of running a TCP/IP stack at low packet rates. This integrated stack enables AMT to use standard protocols, even when a client PC has not booted an operating system. The TCP/IP stack is used for only "out-of-band" management, as opposed to a TCP offload engine (TOE) that must operate at wire speed. Unlike Intel's Northway chip, which never reached production,
the 82573E is not a 90nm design. Instead, the new GbE controller
is
built in TSMC's standard 130nm process. Complete
coverage of GbE controller chips appears in our report A Guide
to Gigabit and 10G Ethernet Silicon. The WinPath NPU is a good fit for PMC, which is focusing more on the access segment these days. In addition, WinPath embeds a MIPS CPU along with its data-plane engines, making it architecturally compatible with PMC's own processors. We would not be surprised if the initial partnership culminates in PMC completely acquiring Wintegra. Given the startup's recent success, however, such an acquisition would not come cheaply. —LG Complete coverage of Wintegra's NPUs appears in our report A Guide to Access Processors.
Coverage of Bay Microsystems appears in our report A Guide to Network Processors and coverage of Parama Networks appears in A Guide to Next-Generation SONET Silicon.
The merchant fabric market improved steadily in 2004, coming in at $60 million. More important, more OEMs than ever before accepted merchant fabrics for their current designs. As these designs enter volume production, we expect rapid market growth, with merchant revenues reaching $375 million in 2008. The stronger fabric vendors among the current survivors can look forward to healthy revenue during the next three to five years. A Guide to Switch Fabrics delivers the latest developments in this dynamic market. This new edition covers switch-fabric requirements, features, architectures, and trends. We provide in-depth coverage of switch fabrics from AMCC, Vitesse, IDT, Agere, AMCC, Dune, Sandburst, TeraChip, StarGen, Xyratex, and Tundra. Also included is analysis of new fabric standards such as ASI, RapidFabric, ATCA 3.0, and the impact these standards will have on silicon vendors and OEMs. The report provides market-growth trends and forecasts of the available business opportunities. The report is now available for immediate delivery. For
more information on this report, visit our web
site.
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