Freescale offers low-power option for networking applications

“Market adoption for the QorIQ P4080 processor has been outstanding, and Freescale is now expanding the scalability of its QorIQ P4 platform via the new quad-core P4040 offering,” said Brett Butler, vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Networking Processor Products Division. “The P4040’s exceptional performance and power profiles, together with the availability of an impressive range of enablement solutions makes the new device a compelling option for networking and communications equipment markets.”

The P4040 is manufactured using 45-nm process technology and features dual memory controllers and the same advanced caching, interconnect acceleration and high-speed I/O technologies as the P4080 processor. The P4040 also leverages the P4080’s embedded hypervisor and Datapath Acceleration Architecture technologies.

The new device integrates four industry-leading e500mc cores based on Power Architecture® technology, delivering frequencies of 1.5 GHz per core. Each core has a dedicated 128 KB L2 backside cache and access to 2MB of shared frontside L3 cache. Full processor independence, including the ability to boot and reset each individual e500mc core, is a defining characteristic of the P4040 device. In addition, the P4040 boasts dual memory controllers that support DDR2 or DDR3 memories allowing board designers to utilize the latest memory technologies.

The P4040 integrates I/O technologies including dual 10-Gbps Ethernet (XAUI) controllers and eight 1-Gbps Ethernet (SGMII) controllers for packetized data processing. For non-packetized processing, there are three PCI Express® v2.0 controllers/ports running at up to 5GHz and two Serial RapidIO® controllers/ports running up to 3.125GHz.