AppliedMicro Enhances its Multi-core PacketPro Processors

AppliedMicro announced the availability of "Diamondback" APM86392 and APM86391, the newest members of its PacketPro™ family of multi-core embedded processing devices. The new processors feature an asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) capability that enables two or more independent subsystems to operate concurrently with effective isolation on a single chip.



AppliedMicro said this feature improves application performance and provides an easier migration to multicore designs with greater flexibility for a wide range of embedded applications in networking, storage, printing, imaging, and multimedia access systems.



Traditional multi-core processors force software engineers to dedicate one of the cores as a master to control the operations of the other slave cores. By harnessing innovative features of the PacketPro family enabled by AppliedMicro's Scalable Lightweight Intelligent Management processor (SLIMpro) subsystem, developers can implement AMP on APM8639x processors without dedicating one of the cores as a master. This enables completely separate and isolated partitions on a single chip, each with independent operating systems, applications, software, processing bandwidth, I/O and cache. Each subsystem is decoupled from other subsystems during software updates, crashes, rebooting, peak performance demands or other events that can interrupt continuous operations.



"In instances of a system fail requiring complete reboot, the PacketPro allows the decoupling of cores without interruption or impact of other subsystems running on the same embedded SoC device," said Jim Johnston, Senior Director of Marketing at AppliedMicro. "Before this, both subsystems would have to be taken down to reboot one operating system due to dependencies from shared cache memory and other resources. AppliedMicro's approach provides each processor with separate and virtualized access to processor resources that one subsystem can continue operation even if any of the other ones becomes inoperative."http://www.apm.com/products/process.html