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XLP™ Processor Family

Overview and Benefits

The RMI® XLP832 Processor is a highly-scalable Super System-on-Chip (SuperSOC™) device that incorporates key functions of a high-end communication system, including wired and wireless security, networking, storage, data center acceleration, load balancing, and other acceleration engines.

The XLP Processor™ is a third-generation architectural enhancement to RMI's industry-leading multi-threaded, multi-core XLR® Processor family. The XLP832 is fabricated using 40-nm technology and offers processor core frequencies from 500 MHz to greater than 2GHz, providing a 3x performance per watt improvement over its XLR predecessor. The XLP832 is software backward-compatible with the XLR and XLS® Processor families.

EC4400™ Processor Cores

The eight EC4400 Processor Cores that power the XLP832 provide optimum performance for both data plane and control plane applications. The EC4400 core architecture maintains the multi-threading capability field-proven to provide the highest possible performance for throughput-oriented data plane processing. In order to demonstrate similar leadership in single-context control plane processing, the EC4400 core features a superscalar engine with out-of-order execution capabilities. The combination of quad-issue instruction scheduling and simultaneous 4-way multi- threading enables new classes of systems with uncompromised performance in a single-chip solution. Each of the four threads (VirtuCores™) embedded in the EC4400 core appears to software as a completely separate processing element, enabling extremely flexible software architectures that simultaneously simplify software development and increase overall system performance.

The EC4400 is MIPS64 Release-II ISA-compliant and contains an IEEE754 and MIPS-compliant floating point unit per core. By combining architectural improvements and frequency enhancements, the EC4400 enables the XLP Processor to deliver a 3x performance per watt improvement over RMI’s performance leading XLR product offering.

Processor Cache Architecture

The XLP832 Processor contains a MOESI+ coherent, three-level cache architecture. Each one of the eight EC4400 cores contains a dedicated 64-KByte instruction cache, a 32-KByte L1 data cache, and a 512-KByte 8-way set-associative L2 cache. The cores also share access to an 8- bank, 16-way set-associative 8-MByte L3 cache, providing a total of 12MBytes of cached data on the XLP832 Processor.

Memory Subsystem

The XLP832 Processor contains a high-performance memory subsystem with four on-chip 72-bit DDR3 memory controllers with 51.2 GBps (Gigabytes per second) of bandwidth.

Fast Messaging Network™

A low-latency, high-speed Fast Messaging Network (FMN) allows for non- intrusive communication and control messaging among VirtuCores, acceleration engines, and I/O. The FMN enables inter-unit communication without the need for spin-locks or semaphores. By passing control descriptors, the FMN also permits lockless simultaneous access to peripheral devices, which dramatically simplifies and increases the performance of the associated device drivers.

Acceleration Engines

The XLP832 Processor contains numerous Autonomous Acceleration Engines® that offload processing tasks from the EC4400 Processor Core, thus freeing up core software to perform other compute-intensive application-dependent tasks:

• A robust Autonomous Network Acceleration Engine® supports up to 40 Gbps of packet throughput. Features included are a programmable packet parsing engine, FCoE, iSCSI and SCTP checksum/CRC generation and verification, TCP/UDP/IP checksum on both ingress and egress, TCP segmentation offload, and IEEE1588v2 precision timing protocol support.
• A Packet Ordering Engine (POE) supports packet ordering for up to 64K flows. The POE can handle up to 60 million packets per second, which corresponds to 40 Gbps with 64-byte packets.
• A 40 Gbps bandwidth Autonomous Security Acceleration Engine®.
• A 10 Gbps compression/decompression engine.
• An 8-channel DMA and Storage Acceleration Engine:
  • RAID-5 XOR acceleration
  • RAID-6 P+Q Galois computations
  • De-duplication acceleration

XLS Resources:

XLP832 Processor Product Brief (PDF)