Multi-Core Processors For Control, Mixed Control/Data Plane Apps
The Comcerto 2000 family of multi-core ARM Cortex-A CPU-based communications processors, made by Mindspeed Technologies, reportedly enable “a new generation of products for switching, routing, security, multi-service gateways, enterprise class wireless access points and controllers, network attached storage and voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications for residential, enterprise and networking equipment for small and medium businesses.”
The processor family was developed for control processors or for mixed control and data plane applications.
The first two devices in the series are the Comcerto C2100 and C2200 with single-core and the dual-core 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processors, respectively, with symmetric multi-processing (SMP), coherent Level Two cache and ARM TrustZone security.
Both devices include Mindspeed’s Open Packet Acceleration Logic (OPAL) engine, a wire-rate, gigabit-speed, programmable data-path acceleration engine coupled with a set of I/O and peripherals as well as support for DDR3 with ECC.
Key functionality and software support includes:
>> A 2 GHz single or dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with SMP and ARM Neon DSPs;
>> Full ARM Cortex processor off load with OPAL: OPAL, a combination of such accelerators 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 2 Gbps NAT, PPPoE and VPN at 64-byte 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 using an on-chip TOE storage processing accelerator;
>> Carrier-grade VoIP supporting as many as 16 complex codecs, robust echo cancellation, fax and modem support;
>> Integrated CAT-iq compliant DECT baseband controller;
>> VoIP applications layer stack with SIP support;
>> Linux distribution with Web-based GUI, Java and OSGI support; and
>> MLC NAND flash controller with ECC.
The C2200 dual-core and the C2100 single-core are sampling to lead customers now, the company says. Carrier-grade software and Linux SDKs also are sampling now.
Future devices in the family will include higher-count, multi-core virtualization support and software support for additional vertical markets and technologies, including SDN.
