New member of embedded microprocessor consortium

A fabless semiconductor start-up that began sampling products in February from its new PWRficient processor family, has become the newest member of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium.

PA Semi, a fabless semiconductor start-up that began sampling products in February from its new PWRficient processor family, has become the newest member of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium.

PA Semi joins EEMBC as a member of the consortium's board of directors, with full voting rights on all major issues decided by the consortium, plus full access to all of the EEMBC benchmarks.

"PA Semi and EEMBC share a keen awareness of the growing importance of processor energy consumption and multicore processors", says Markus Levy, EEMBC President.

"We are thus looking forward to the contribution that PA Semi will make to the consortium as EEMBC's EnergyBench tool continues to gain traction in the marketplace and more and more designers recognise the importance of measuring processor energy consumption with respect to strictly defined workloads according to standardised criteria".

PA Semi's dual-core PA6T-1682M PWRficient processor is based on IBM's Power Architecture.

The 1682M includes two 2GHz processors (each with its own dual-integer, floating-point, and VMX vector-processing units), 2Mbyte of level-two cache, two DDR-2 memory controllers and hardware-assist engines for TCP/IP acceleration, security, CRC checksum, and XOR computation.

The device also integrates a flexible I/O subsystem that supports eight PCI Express controllers, two 10Gbit/s Ethernet controllers, and four Gbit/s Ethernet controllers that share 24 configurable SERDES lanes.

"We are pleased to join EEMBC, as it provides a very comprehensive suite of standard embedded benchmarks that align very well with PA Semi's target markets and customers", says Peter Bannon, Vice President of Architecture and Verification at PA Semi.

"We look forward to being able to showcase the performance and power of our dual-core PWRficient processors using EEMBC's various benchmark suites and EnergyBench tool".

PA Semi was established in 2003 by industry veterans including Dan Dobberpuhl, the lead designer of the DEC Alpha and StrongARM microprocessors and the first multicore system on chip, the SiByte 1250.

PA Semi's PWRficient processors are based on, and fully software-compatible with, the highly regarded Power Architecture instruction set, licensed to PA Semi by IBM.

The company's first dual-core system on chip processor, the PA6T-1682M, is targeted at the high-performance embedded computing and control markets.

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