AppliedMicro’s energy conscious processors continue drive toward low-power processing

SUNNYVALE, USA: Applied Micro Circuits Corp., or AppliedMicro, a global leader in energy conscious computing and communications solutions, today announced energy efficient versions of the company’s families of 405 and 460 microprocessors that consume up to 40 percent less power for a variety of embedded applications.

The company’s Power Architecture 405EX, 405EXr, 460EX, 460EXr and 460GT processors have been optimized for low-power consumption.

“Emerging data service models and exploding use of video-based applications place increasing performance demands on embedded systems, yet energy consumption is a growing concern for both systems designers and end-users,” said Robert Fanfelle, AppliedMicro’s associate vice president of strategic marketing.

“AppliedMicro’s low-power Power Architecture 405 and 460 processors represent the company’s focus to bring game-changing energy efficiency to embedded systems without sacrificing performance. The new versions of these processors offer identical functionality and performance with the advantage of low power consumption to enable system designers to reduce their energy consumption and meet environmentally-conscious goals.”

The new low-power processor family members offer up to 40 percent lower worst case power consumption and an improvement of about 20 percent in typical power consumption. For example, the Power Architecture 405EXr, which finds application in WLAN access points as well as NAS storage systems and media gateways, now offers a maximum worst case active power consumption of just over 2 watts, a reduction of almost 1.5 watts, or 40 percent.

All current AppliedMicro customers using 405EX/EXr and 460EX/EXr/GT products will be migrated to the new low-power variants. Moving forward, all new customers for these products will use the low-power version.

“End users and OEMs alike are seeing a strong market shift to systems that are increasingly energy efficient, and we have provided our customers with a solution that does not compromise performance for energy savings,” said Gopi Sirineni, associate vice president of AppliedMicro’s consumer and small/medium business division.

AppliedMicro’s Power Architecture 405EX and 405EXr processors are designed into 802.11 wireless access points, WiMAX base stations and general networking and embedded systems. The 405EX offers core frequencies up to 600MHz along with a multitude of industry-standard interfaces including DDR2 SDRAM, two gigabit Ethernet, and two PCI-Express interfaces.

The Power Architecture 460EX/EXr/GT processors are designed for enterprise and carrier-class switching and routing equipment, multi-function printers and industrial applications. The 460-based devices offer speeds up to 1.2 GHz, a 256KB L2 cache, and an integrated floating-point unit.

The 460EX/GT offers up to four gigabit Ethernet interfaces, two PCI-Express interfaces, legacy PCI support, two USB 2.0 interfaces, a SATA controller, hardware-RAID acceleration and Kasumi encryption/decryption. Both the 405EX/EXr and the 460 devices have a hardware-based crypto-engine for data security acceleration.

The low-power versions of AppliedMicro’s Power Architecture 405EX, 405EXr, 460EX, 460EXr, and 460GT products are now available in production quantities.