Frugal PowerPC embeds power management features

System developers can rev up the performance of their embedded applications while staying within tight power budgets by using the MPC7447A processor from Motorola.

System developers can rev up the performance of their embedded applications while staying within tight power budgets by using the MPC7447A processor from Motorola.

This high-performance, power-efficient 32bit RISC device, operating in excess of 1.4GHz, is the latest and fastest member of the MPC74xx PowerPC processor family.

The MPC7447A offers developers on-chip power management features, such as the ability to change clock frequencies dynamically.

This capability enables users to change CPU clock speed on the fly and significantly reduce processor power consumption to match performance with application requirements.

The MPC7447A processor also contains a temperature sensing diode that can be used to monitor die temperature under various operating conditions.

MPC7447A processors are manufactured in Austin, Texas, on Motorola's 130nm HiPerMOS silicon-on-insulator (SOI) copper interconnect process technology, which is designed to enable superior performance and excellent low power capability.

When operating at 1.42GHz, the MPC7447A has a typical power consumption of less than 20W.

A lower-power version of the MPC7447A, consuming less than 10W at 1167MHz, is available for power-sensitive applications that require gigahertz-class performance.

"There seems to be a fundamental shift in how CPUs are used outside the ordinary server and PC markets", said Eric M Mantion, Senior Analyst with In-Stat/MDR.

"For system design concepts such as grid computing or embedded computing, developers don't just care about raw computational abilities, but rather the ratio of performance capabilities to power consumption.

This new flops-per-watt metric becomes critical for advanced networking equipment used to handle terabits of data, or for paradigm-shifting computational platforms like Mercury Computer Systems' PowerStream 7000.

When developing a system that can perform teraflops of calculations in a refrigerator-size form factor, it is difficult to do this at 100W per CPU.

Due to its exceptional performance per wattage ratio, we can expect to see Motorola's MPC7447A PowerPC processor used in a wide number of embedded applications over the next few years".

The MPC7447A offers exceptional price/performance and is an optimal processor solution for a wide range of embedded applications, such as network control plane processing, telecommunications switching, signal processing, high-end printers, and state-of-the art military, healthcare monitoring, and industrial imaging systems.

"Motorola's MPC7447A processor enables Mercury to develop higher-performance products for commercial applications such as semiconductor inspection, while preserving our customers' application investment", said Richard Jaenicke, Director of Product Management at Mercury Computer Systems.

"In defence electronics, the MPC7447A makes it possible to phase into production a backward-compatible upgrade that provides increased performance per watt, which is critical to airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance applications".

At the heart of the MPC7447A is a high-speed superscalar PowerPC core that is capable of issuing four instructions per clock cycle (three instructions plus branch) into eleven independent execution units.

Additional architectural features that distinguish the MPC7447A include 512Kbyte of on-chip L2 cache, full symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support, a 64bit bus interface, and a full 128bit implementation of Motorola's AltiVec single instruction multiple data (SIMD) vector processing technology.

AltiVec technology is designed to deliver exceptional compute power for controller and signal processing applications.

With its vector execution unit, AltiVec technology supports high-bandwidth data processing and computationally intensive algorithms, such as those used in high-end routers and wireless basestations.

This advanced approach allows designers to leverage existing PowerPC code and add AltiVec performance as market and customer requirements change - helping speed time to market and increase system performance without upgrading hardware.

AltiVec code libraries are available from the Motorola website.

MPC7447A processors are pin compatible with Motorola's MPC7445 and MPC7447 processors.

This pin-compatible migration path helps customers reduce their development costs, accelerates time to market, and ensures software compatibility.

Like all Motorola processors containing PowerPC cores, the MPC7447A is software compatible with the MPC7xx family of processors from Motorola.

The MPC7447A is available in a 360-pin ceramic ball grid array (CBGA) package, an ideal choice for space-constrained designs requiring a smaller embedded CPU footprint.

As with other Motorola processors containing PowerPC cores, the MPC7447A is supported by an extensive suite of software and hardware development tools from Metrowerks, a Motorola company, and from third-party members of Motorola's Smart Networks Alliance.

Motorola has measured the performance of the 1.42GHz MPC7447A processor in five different application areas using the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium's (EEMBC) benchmarks.

The resulting scores as certified by the EEMBC Certification Labs (ECL) are shown below for the out-of-the-box ANSI C code provided by EEMBC and for the networking and telecommunications benchmarks optimised per EEMBC rules using AltiVec technology.

The optimised benchmarks demonstrate the potential performance improvement that is possible through innovative software techniques that take advantage of AltiVec technology.

Initial samples of the MPC7447A PowerPC processor are available today to selected customers.

Suggested retail pricing for the MPC7447A at 1.42GHz is US $245 in quantities of 10,000.

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