The 'lowest power' quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 based processor

13th April 2016

Nat Bowers

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Expanding its QorIQ processor family, NXP Semiconductors has announced the LS1046A, which is claimed to be the industry’s lowest power quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 based processor. The product combines extreme power efficiency with the QorIQ portfolio’s signature scalability and breadth, delivering compelling benefits for the industrial, enterprise router/switching and CPE/vCPE (virtual Customer Premise Equipment) markets.

Family-wide software and pin-to-pin compatibility make it easy for network equipment manufacturers to upgrade the performance of existing designs to meet the rapidly changing needs of today’s virtual networks.

As traffic to the home and small office increases exponentially, the LS1046A is a suitable choice for CPE and vCPE markets, with its two 10GbE ports, outstanding CPU and packet performance and low 7W power envelope. With integrated packet processing acceleration up to 2GHz, the QorIQ LS1046A is also well suited for high performance network, storage, security and industrial applications, including enterprise routers and switches, vCPE, network-attached storage products and service provider gateways.

Offering four times the performance of previous-gen QorIQ LS1 series processors, the QorIQ LS1046A is available in a 23x23mm package and is compatible with NXP’s QorIQ LS1023A, LS1043A and LS1088A SoCs, making it easy to scale performance among 64-bit ARM designs -- from dual Cortex-A53 cores through to quad Cortex-A72 core processors. Hardware and software compatibility reduces costs and speeds time-to-market, making it easy to reuse existing code and design elements.

The QorIQ LS1046A offers performance above 32,000 CoreMarks and integrates 10GB Ethernet, PCIe Gen. 3, SATA 3.0, USB 3.0 and QSPI interfaces.

Initial availability for the QorIQ LS1046A is set for Q3 2016.