AppliedMicro showcases world's first 64-bit ARM v8 core

SANTA CLARA, USA: Applied Micro Circuits Corp. demonstrated core functionality of the world's first 64-bit ARM processor on an FPGA platform during ARM TechCon 2011. This milestone comes on the same day as ARM Holdings' announcement of its 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set architecture, and parallels AppliedMicro's launch of the industry's first 64-bit ARM "Server-on-a-Chip" solution in a single footprint, designed to deliver disruptively low power and cost points.

"The demonstration marks a fundamental achievement by AppliedMicro's engineering team to provide a proof of a single PMD core running both UBoot and 64-bit Linux," said Vinay Ravuri, Vice President of AppliedMicro's Embedded and Processing Business Unit. "It also provides pre-silicon customer evaluation of our 64-bit ARM solution and paves the way for a more sustainable future of cloud computing as we leverage this architecture to provide high-performance devices that consume less power and lower costs compared to today's server chips."

The demonstration platform consists of Xilinx Virtex-6 running Server SoC consisting of ARM-64 CPU complex, coherent CPU fabric, high performance I/O network, memory subsystem along with fully functional SoC subsystem.

Applied Micro's 64-bit processor family will leverage a large installed base of ARM software and hardware solutions and appeal to the open-source software community, similar to its 32-bit predecessor. With tremendous interest shown by top-tier OEMs and ODMs in the cloud computing space, the platform is fully enabled with server class open-source Linux distributions. Additionally Applied Micro is working with a number of server-class and embedded Linux vendors. Full open-source compilers and tool chains will be provided by AppliedMicro and ARM ecosystem partners.

Additionally, optimized compilers, tool chains, and debuggers will be provided by key strategic partners.

Full ecosystem support for the FPGA platform with performance metrics will be available for customer evaluation by the first half of 2012. A full suite of cloud computing applications driving various target workloads, such as Web, Memcached, Hadoop, Webserver, will also be available in that timeframe.