Mindspeed Technologies introduced its Comcerto 2000 family of multi-core ARM Cortex-A CPU-based communications processors for either control processors or for mixed control and data plane applications. 
The processors are aimed at a new generation of products for switching, routing, security, multi-service gateways, enterprise class wireless access points and controllers, network attached storage and VoIP applications for residential, enterprise and networking equipment for small and medium businesses.
The first two devices in the series are Comcerto C2100 and C2200 with single-core and dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processors, respectively, with symmetric multi-processing (SMP), coherent level two cache and ARM TrustZone security.
Both devices include Mindspeed's OPAL (Open Packet Acceleration Logic) engine, a wire rate gigabit-speed programmable data-path acceleration engine and a comprehensive set of I/O and peripherals, as well as support for DDR3 with ECC. This enables a new class of cost-effective products that support new protocols and higher speeds with lower power consumption. Silicon, carrier-grade software and Linux software design kits (SDK) are sampling now.
Key functionality and software support includes:
- 1.2GHz single or dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with SMP and ARM Neon DSPs
- Full ARM Cortex processor off load with OPAL: Open Packet Acceleration Logic, a combination of accelerators, such as Packet classification and forwarding for NAT, VPN/firewall applications, QoS processor, DPI engine, security processing accelerator for IPSec/SSL processing, TCP offload engine for NAS, VoIP media processing and a general purpose accelerator for running customer power & management control processing or proprietary protocol processing.
- OPAL supports 2Gbps NAT, PPPoE and VPN at 64byte packet, with ARM cores fully offloaded
- Extensive I/O support including support for three GEMAC (SGMII, GMII, RGMII), USB 2.0 & 3.0, PCI Gen 2, SATA, DECT, SLIC/SLAC and TDM ports
- XOR engine RAID acceleration
- Support for DDR3 with ECC support
- TrustZone and secure boot support
- Carrier grade IPv6/IPv4 packet forwarding, NAT, firewall, QoS and IPSec/SSL stack support
- NAS applications stack implementation utilizing on chip TOE storage processing accelerator
- Carrier grade VoIP supporting up to 16 complex codecs, robust echo cancellation, fax and modem support; Integrated
- CAT-iq compliant DECT baseband controller; VoIP applications layer stack with SIP support.
Future devices in the family will include higher count multi-core, virtualization support and software support for additional vertical markets and technologies, such as SDN. http://www.mindspeed.com
