Processor Pumped For LTE Communications Infrastructure

May 4, 2011 12:35 PM, MD&D News Staff

Billed as the industry’s most powerful multicore control-plane processor for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) infrastructures, the XLP316 from NetLogic Microsystems exploits a quad-core, 16-issue, 16-threaded, superscalar architecture with out-of-order execution and an L3 cache. Stacked against similar quad-core processors with dual-issue and single-threading per core, in-order execution, and sans the L3 cache, the XLP316 promises up to 400% higher control-plane processing performance. Other features include 16 NXCPUs interconnected via NetLogic Microsystems’ Enhanced Fast Messaging Network, a tri-level cache architecture with 4 Mbytes of L3 cache and over 6 Mbytes of fully coherent on-chip cache, and one channel of 72-bit DDR3 interconnect that enables over 100 Gbits/s of off-chip memory bandwidth. Integrated interfaces include PCI Express Gen2 4x1 or 1x4 eight Gigabit Ethernet (SGMII) channels, two XAUI ports, USB2.0, and XEN Hypervisor virtualization and I/O virtualization (SR-IOV). For more details and applications, respectively, visit www.netlogicmicro.com/news/pr/inthenews/MPR.pdf and www.netlogicmicro.com/News/pr/inthenews/N9_NetLogic-layout_links.pdf.