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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Platforms:
Motorola PowerPC Processor
Delivers New Power Mgmt 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 Inc. This high-performance, power-efficient 32-bit 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.
Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed
computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid
computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference
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Grid computing is here!
"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 100 Watts 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 Inc. "In defense
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 +
branch) into 11 independent execution units. Additional architectural features
that distinguish the MPC7447A include 512KB of on-chip L2 cache, full
symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support, a 64-bit bus interface, and a full
128-bit 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 at
www.motorola.com/altivec.
MPC7447A processors are pin-for-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.
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