The Linley Group

At last week’s Intel Developer Forum, a number of chip vendors announced or demonstrated products that support PCIe Gen2. The “PCIe Gen2” nickname refers to the new 5GHz transfer rate specified by PCIe v2.0. Unfortunately, Gen2 and v2.0 are not synonymous, because the new rate is optional rather than mandatory.

Helping fill out the Gen2 ecosystem, PLX announced a range of new PCIe switch chips that support 5GHz operation on all lanes. The flagship of the new line is the PEX8648, which has 48 lanes and supports up to 12 ports. Like its Gen1 predecessor (the 8548), the 8648 supports any combination of port widths up to x16. At 5GHz, a x16 port delivers a massive 64Gbps each way after accounting for 8b/10b encoding overhead. Derivative devices will offer as few as three ports and 12 lanes. The complete PEX86xx family is due to sample during 4Q07.

Mellanox demonstrated and announced immediate availability of InfiniBand and 10GbE adapters and controller chips for PCIe Gen2. For 20Gbps (DDR) InfiniBand, PCIe Gen2 provides a 30% throughput increase over Gen1 when using a x8 interface. For 10GbE, PCIe Gen2 enables line-rate throughput for two ports using a x8 interface. Broadcom showed another benefit of PCIe Gen2 by demonstrating line-rate operation of a single 10GbE port using a narrower x4 interface. Thus, compared with PCIe v1.x, Gen2 cuts 10GbE lane requirements in half. Broadcom’s demonstration used its new BCM57710 CNIC chip, which is currently sampling.

Although Intel did not formally announce a Gen2-capable server platform, the Mellanox and Broadcom demonstrations used “Stoakley” DP systems, which are due for production in 4Q07. These announcements and demonstrations show that key pieces of the ecosystem should be available as Stoakley reaches production. —Bob

Last week, Freescale announced two new PowerQuicc devices designed for storage applications: the MPC837x and the MPC831x. These devices combine a Power e300 CPU at up to 667MHz with SATA interfaces that connect directly to multiple hard drives, enabling low-cost RAID devices. The higher-speed 837x can be used in SMB applications, whereas the lower-cost 831x targets consumer and SOHO applications.

Both chips are highly integrated SoC designs that include a security engine as well as PCI Express, Ethernet (SGMII), and USB ports, the latter with an integrated PHY to reduce system cost. Thus, the chips can be used in NAS boxes, storage appliances, or advanced printers with internal hard drives. These PowerQuicc chips do not include the Quicc Engine, which is not needed in these applications.

The flagship 8379 provides four SATA ports, supporting four-drive RAID configurations, and a 667MHz CPU. The 8315 includes two SATA ports and a 400MHz CPU. List pricing (10k resale) ranges from $19 for the 8315 to $37 for the 8379. The chips are currently sampling, with production scheduled for 2Q08.

Although Freescale is about two years behind LSI and Vitesse in launching storage processors with integrated SATA, these competitors have so far aimed mainly at enterprise applications, where NAS and RAID have been most popular. The new PowerQuicc chips do not support SAS, which is popular in enterprise, but they offer greater integration and a much lower price than the SAS/SATA chips from other vendors. By targeting the emerging SMB/SOHO segment, Freescale can make up for lost time in the storage market. —Linley

At this week’s Power Architecture Developers Conference, AMCC announced the PPC460GT, its fastest processor yet. At 1.2GHz, the superscalar CPU delivers plenty of performance for cellular basestations and enterprise networking. The integrated device includes a 256KB level-two cache, a security engine, a DDR2 SDRAM controller, and an array of I/O interfaces.

For basestations, the 460GT includes a x4 serial RapidIO (sRIO) interface that can connect directly to DSP chips from Texas Instruments and other vendors. The chip’s encryption engine supports Kasumi, an algorithm used in many cellular standards. For enterprise, the chip includes four Gigabit Ethernet ports, two with hardware acceleration for TCP and other data-plane services. Typical power dissipation is just 6W at 1GHz.

The 460GT matches up well against Freescale’s PowerQuicc 8548 family, although Freescale’s chip is already in production and AMCC’s is not scheduled to sample until next quarter. Both chips offer similar features and performance, but the 460GT appears to have lower power and pricing. Freescale dominates in cellular basestations, but it may need to cut its prices to respond to this new threat. —Linley

This week, Irish startup Lightstorm Networks announced sampling of its first product. Brooklyn-10 is a 20Gbps Ethernet switch designed for carrier applications including Ethernet-over-SONET/SDH and Provider Backbone Transport (PBT). The chip integrates ten Gigabit Ethernet ports on the line side and a channelized SPI-4.2 interface on the uplink/fabric side. Brooklyn-10 is priced at $250 in volume. Compared with programmable network processors, Lightstorm’s configurable chip offers lower cost and easier software integration. —Bob

Complete coverage of Lightstorm appears in our report A Guide to Metro Network Processors.

New Seminar on Communications and Embedded Processors

The Linley Group has announced that its next Linley Tech seminar will be titled Processors for Networking and Communications. This event, to be held on November 14 in San Jose, will focus on two key trends. First, the shift of high-speed embedded processors toward multicore designs. Ranging from 2 to 64 CPUs, these powerful processors can be used for control-plane or data-plane applications or combinations of the two.

The second trend is the development of lower-cost communications processors that combine a fast CPU with data-plane engines. As video and voice (VoIP) become prevalent in the network, these processors are needed in access infrastructure, wireless basestations, and even SMB and SOHO gateway equipment.

Don’t miss this chance to meet with experts in these areas and hear technical presentations from the leading vendors. This Linley Tech seminar will be held at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose. Admission is free to qualified attendees who pre-register. Sponsored by Freescale, AMCC, LSI, IBM, Ubicom, and PA Semi.

For more information, visit our web site.

Report Highlights: A Guide to 10G Ethernet Adapters and Controller Chips

The transition to 10G Ethernet (10GbE) has spawned many new technologies for Ethernet-controller designs and attracted a plethora of vendors. This market is growing crowded, however, with at least a dozen companies offering 10GbE adapters or controller chips.

A Guide to 10G Ethernet Adapters and Controller Chips identifies the early leaders in this space and analyzes new entrants' chances of success. The report builds on our previous coverage of Gigabit and 10G Ethernet chips, providing full chapters on each of the leading 10GbE NIC and controller vendors. Because OEMs buy both board-level and chip-level products, we now include full coverage and comparisons of both 10GbE NICs and 10GbE controller chips. Also covered are GbE controller chips designed for server NIC/LOM applications. Finally, we include coverage of PCI Express switch chips that can be used in server fan-out, modular-backplane, and multiport-NIC/HBA designs.

Order by October 15 and take $300 off the list price. For greater savings, order this report with A Guide to Ethernet Switch and PHYs and take $1,500 off the combined list price. For more information on this report, visit our web site.