NetLogic intros XLP864 -- industry’s highest performance multi-core processor featuring 64 NXCPUs

SANTA CLARA, USA: NetLogic Microsystems Inc. announced the XLP864 multi-core processor, the industry’s highest performance multi-core communications processor featuring 64 NXCPUs.

The XLP864 processor is the latest member of NetLogic Microsystems’ best-in-class XLP multi-core, multi-threaded processor family, which has been validated by multiple Tier One customers to deliver 300-400 percent performance improvement over competing multi-core processors in real-world benchmarks on a core-by-core basis.

By doubling the number of NXCPUs compared to the industry-leading XLP832 processor, which has set itself as the gold standard of advanced multi-core processing, the new XLP864 multi-core processor further enhances NetLogic Microsystems’ performance leadership and further separates the company from the competition in multi-core communications processing.

NetLogic Microsystems’ new XLP864 multi-core, multi-threaded processor is optimized to deliver 80Gbps throughput and 120 million packets-per-second (Mpps) of intelligent application performance for next-generation 3G/4G mobile wireless infrastructure, metro Ethernet, security, storage, enterprise, edge and core infrastructure network applications.

“We are pleased to raise the bar once again and be on the forefront of technical leadership with our new XLP864 processor, which will deliver unprecedented performance and functionality for our customers’ next-generation systems,” said Chris O’Reilly, vice president of marketing at NetLogic Microsystems. “This comes at an ideal time as the communications industry struggles to keep pace with the dramatic increase in bandwidth and traffic complexity. We believe our XLP multi-core processor is the best solution to capitalize on this trend.”

NetLogic Microsystems’ best-in-class XLP processor family is the first and only embedded communications processor that features quad-issue, quad-threaded and superscalar out-of-order execution capabilities operating at up to 2.0 GHz. The XLP cores are quad-threaded to minimize application bottlenecks due to memory latency, thereby greatly improving performance for network data plane processing applications. Furthermore, the NXCPUs are equipped with a tri-level cache architecture with over 25 Mbytes of fully coherent on-chip cache which delivers 40 Terabits/sec of extremely high-speed on-chip memory bandwidth.

"The powerful XLP cores are well suited to a variety of performance-intensive applications," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst of The Linley Group. "This design is already proven in the XLP832, which has been sampling to customers for more than six months. Since then, NetLogic has quickly completed the XLP864 design, extending this product line to new levels of industry-leading performance."

The XLP864 multi-core processor features NetLogic Microsystems’ high-speed, low-latency Enhanced Fast Messaging Network to enable efficient, high-bandwidth communication among the 64 NXCPUs and to support billions of in-flight messages and packet descriptors between all on-chip elements.

To complement the 64 NXCPUs, the XLP864 processor offers over 80 fully-autonomous processing engines that provide independent and complete offload of certain network functions from the NXCPUs, including:
* 80 Gbps fully-autonomous Security Acceleration Engine supporting networking, wireless and storage encryption/decryption/authentication protocols;
* 80 Gbps Network Acceleration Engines for Ingress/Egress Packet Parsing and Management;
* 256 Gbps RAID-5/RAID-6 Acceleration;
* 20 Gbps Compression/Decompression;
* Packet Ordering;
* Storage De-Duplication Acceleration;
* TCP Segmentation Offload;
* IEEE 1588 Hardware Time Stamping;

The XLP864 multi-core processor also integrates a wide range of high-speed networking interfaces, including Interlaken, XAUI, SGMII, PCI-Express®, USB2.0, and NetLogic Microsystems’ high-bandwidth Inter-chip Coherency Interface (ICI) that provides seamless chip-to-chip cache and memory coherency with full software transparency.

The XLP864 multi-core processor is manufactured in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC’s) advanced 40nm process technology, enabling higher clock speeds, a lower power profile, and improved manufacturability compared to legacy 65nm process technologies.