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networkZONE Products for the week of June 2, 2008
Applied Micro Circuits Corporation Says…
Advanced PowerPC 460SX Storage Processor for High Throughput RAID Acceleration
Feature-rich embedded device offers time to market advantages and interoperability with 6G SAS and 8G FC
Applied Micro Circuits Corporation has announced the newest member of its storage processor family, the PowerPC-460SX. Based on the Power Architecture standard, the PowerPC 460SX storage processor integrates a PowerPC core and specialized functions for high-performance storage and storage networking applications.
With a rich feature set and high-performance, the PowerPC 460SX is designed to meet the demanding requirements of server direct-attached and external storage applications. The unique combination of high-performance IO and memory subsystems also make the PowerPC 460SX ideal for high-bandwidth protocol bridging applications.
The PowerPC 460SX, with clock frequencies ranging from 833MHz to 1.4GHz, provides multiple PCI Express Gen 2 interfaces for high bandwidth peripheral connectivity and efficient PCIe to PCIe bridging. For storage applications, the PowerPC 460SX provides high throughput RAID 5 and RAID 6 hardware-acceleration support capable of achieving 1500MB/s RAID 5 and 1400MB/s RAID 6 full stripe write performance. It also includes XTS-AES and GCM-AES encryption acceleration that is compliant with the IEEE 1619 and 1619.1 standards. For network attachment, the PowerPC 460SX includes four GbE Ethernet MACs, TCI/IP assist, QoS and a crypto engine for IPSec and SSL. With these features, the PowerPC 460SX can improve both system performance and data security, by performing RAID 5 and RAID 6 parity calculations while at the same time encrypting and decrypting data in transit and data at rest.
“AMCC's PowerPC 460SX takes storage processors to a new level. Its extensive I/O connectivity, high CPU performance, RAID5/6 and encryption engines, low power consumption, and feature integration make this processor well suited for a wide range of storage applications,” said Linley Gwennap, Principal Analyst of The Linley Group. “Combined with AMCC's hardware-accelerated RAID-on-Linux technology, the new PowerPC 460SX provides customers with a complete system solution for seamless integration.”
To support the high bandwidth transactions, the PowerPC 460SX features two internal buses that support simultaneous read/write operations for a combined total of 19.2 GBytes/s of peak bandwidth. This bus topology enables concurrent transactions for write data to memory, read data from memory, encrypt/decrypt data, and computation of RAID parities.
“Customers are demanding high-performance, feature-rich storage solutions which increase throughput while lowering power consumption,” said Sam Fuller, Vice President of Marketing for AMCC. “Our new storage processor enables new storage systems to take full advantage of the new 6G SAS and 8G Fibre Channel technologies and maintains AMCC’s performance and feature leadership in storage processing.”
EN-Genius Says…
This AMCC storage processor makes sense from a bunch of different angles. By providing enough raw compute power and specialized hardware assist on a single chip, it is one of the most cost-efficient ways to implement a high-performance storage controller system I’ve seen to date. Its complex multi-bus architecture ensures that the PowerPC 464 core and the legion of accelerator cores all get access to memory and peripheral resources without starving each other for bandwidth. Finally, AMCC has equipped the controller with an arsenal of I/O capabilities that allow it to work well in storage area network (SAN), network attached storage (NAS), and direct-attached storage (DAS) applications.
Thankfully, the detailed release spares me the job of ticking off the huge laundry list of functions and features they’ve managed to cram onto the chip but the block diagram I pulled off one of their presentations should give you a better idea of how it all fits together.
 One of the most interesting features on the chip is its unique internal multi-bus architecture. Boasting a combined total peak bandwidth 19.2 Gbyte/s, its unique topology supports concurrent transactions from host data to memory, read data from memory, encrypt/decrypt data, and compute RAID parities. The primary bus is a 128-bit two-way crossbar with simultaneous read/write operations from each bus segment supporting 12.8 Gbyte/s peak bandwidth. It’s primarily used for high-speed I/O movements and block transfers to and from host and I/O controller. The secondary 128-bit bus with simultaneous read/write operation provides an additional 6.4 Gbyte/s, and is primarily used to support RAID and encryption computations.
Both busses can simultaneously perform memory with operations using an interleave scheme that allows one bus to issue a request while the other is waiting for results. To prevent conflicts, Processor Local Bus Master Arbiter can be programmed to give particular bus priority for memory access. The controller DDR2 memory controller supports up to 16 Gbyte worth of 533 MHz, 667 MHz, and 800 MHz memory. AMCC points out, with pride, that they’ve worked hard to ensure that even their slowest speed grade CPU supports the fastest memory speed. In many applications, the ability to support the faster RAM gives enough of a performance boost to allow a designer to meet their design requirements with a less expensive, lower-power processor.
AMCC has also put a lot of effort into its support software, especially an open source Linux OS and RAID stack that it’s developing with its partner DenX. This is critical both to address the Asean electronics market’s tight cost constraints and increasing demand for open-source solutions. While Linux is now the de facto OS for many applications, the standard implementation had several performance limitations that had to be overcome before it was suitable for use in such demanding real-time environment. Since the original MD driver, found in the Linux Kernel, was never intended to support the huge throughput that the 460SX delivers, AMCC created the Linux Asynchronous DMA interface that offloads data path tasks to DMA engines. This storage-optimized Linux also offers other enhancements, such as page size, memory copies and smart DMA commands.
The result is a potent hardware/software combination that cuts the cost, development time and power involved with both networked and attached storage systems. The lightweight Linux OS and the on-chip hardware offload also frees a good chunk of the PPC processing power for adding whatever higher-layer management software or developing any other value-add functionality your application might need.
The PowerPC 460SX is fabricated in IBM Cu-08, 90-nm CMOS process technology, and packaged in a 29mm x 29mm 783-Ball, 1-mm pitch, FC-PBGA. It requires a core voltage of 1.11 V – 1.3 V and has a typical power dissipation of under 10 W at 800 MHz.
The PowerPC 460SX will sample in Q3 of 2008.
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