Freescale Semiconductor has added floating point capability to its QorIQ Qonverge B4 range of DSP-based system-on-chip devices.
The B4420 and B4860 are the first devices in the family to include floating point arithmetic. The target computation-intensive applications include radar, medical and media imaging, video analytics, security and industrial automation.
The B4860 runs at up to 14.4GHz and integrates four e6500 dual-threaded Power Architecture processor cores resulting in 61,000 processor CoreMark.
The chip’s six fixed- and floating-point SC3900FP DSP cores yield 230.4 GMACS of fixed-point performance and 115.2 GFLOPS of floating-point performance.
Combined with the four AltiVec SIMD engines embedded in e6500 cores, a total of 172.8 GFLOPS of IEEE 754 floating-point performance is attained.
The devices retain binary code compatibility with the existing SC3900 core.
Unusually for a heterogeneous multicore architectures, the B4 family provides a full cache-coherent system keeping data consistency of the shared resource stored in local caches.
This is not only between L1 and shared L2 caches within the core clusters but also between the different types of core clusters and external interfaces with no software intervention.
The B4860 SoC incorporates a suite of high-speed standard interfaces including two 10Gbit/s XFI/XAUI Ethernet controllers, four 2.5Gbit/s/1Gbit/s SGMII Ethernet controllers and two Serial RapidIO v2.1 controllers.
It also includes two DDR3/3L controllers, 64/72-bit with ECC at 1.867 GHz, NAND/NOR flash controller, I2C, SPI, SDHC, USB and UART interfaces.
The development ecosystem for the B4860 includes the CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on Eclipse technology.
Available tools include the B4860QDS and B4420QDS development boards, C optimizing compilers for Power Architecture and StarCore cores, source-level multicore debuggers, device and core software simulators, optimised device drivers, a Linux SDK, and software analysis tools for profiling and program/data trace. |
