Broadband gateway processor uses two ARMs

Mindspeed Technologies has used two ARM1136J-S processors in its Comcerto 100 series of broadband gateway processors.

ARM and Mindspeed Technologies are working together to address the needs of broadband service providers delivering triple- (voice, data, video) and quad-play (plus cellular) applications to homes and small businesses.

The collaboration has already resulted in the successful development and launch last year of the Mindspeed Comcerto 100 series of broadband gateway processors.

The Comcerto 100 is a single chip solution based on two ARM1136J-S processors and provides the best performance-power-cost profile in its class by optimal decomposition of broadband gateway functions among the two processors.

Because the Comcerto 100 is based on the ARM architecture, Mindspeed was able to provide high performance at low cost and with extremely low power.

In addition, the scalability of the high-performance ARM processor-based multicore solution enables the Comcerto100 to provide significant application headroom for future service deployments.

"The ARM architecture is the optimal solution to enable us to offer best-in-class quality of service (QoS) for the service delivery platforms that are emerging as broadband gateways evolve into an intelligent access point in the home, managing multiple end-nodes with multimedia capabilities", says Preet Virk, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mindspeed's enterprise and customer premise equipment.

"The need for more bandwidth and sophisticated services within an ever-diminishing power budget can only realistically be met by high-performance multiprocessing".

"As the leading provider of high-performance embedded multicore processing solutions, ARM is our logical choice for future development".

"Mindspeed is a leading implementer of multicore platforms optimised for gateway applications", says Ian Ferguson, Director Enterprise Solutions, ARM.

"We look forward to a long term engaugement with Mindspeed as they expand their portfolio of innovative multicore-based SoCs utilising the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor to address next-generation service provider gateway requirements".

The two companies are already collaborating on next-generation gateway platform solutions for the residential and enterprise market segments and comarketing these solutions to service providers and OEMs/ODMs.

The Comcerto100 architecture uses optimal decomposition of broadband gateway functions among two high-performance ARM1136J-S processors to ensure QoS for real-time applications.

With real-time processing such as voice, video and packet forwarding optimised to reside on one of the processors and non real-time processing such as network monitoring and subscriber management on the second; the Comcerto100 broadband gateway architecture protects the quality and reliability of revenue-bearing services while providing application headroom for future service deployments.

Because of this asymmetric multicore partitioning, OEMs and service providers can easily program higher level applications without worrying about the impact to real-time functionality or headroom limitations due to shared processing resources.

With clear demarcation between real-time processing like voice and video and non real-time processing such as monitoring and subscriber management, the Comcerto 100 processor enables a broadband gateway architecture that protects revenue-bearing services while providing application headroom for future service deployments.

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