Multicore SoCs

June 1, 2013

Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX) recently unveiled six new multicore System-on-Chips (SoCs) based on its award winning KeyStone architecture. These 28-nm devices integrate TI’s fixed-and floating-point TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) generation cores with multiple ARM® Cortex™-A15 MPCore™ processors, facilitating the development of a widerange of infrastructure applications that can enable more efficient cloud experiences. TI’s six new highperformance SoCs include the 66AK2E02, 66AK2E05, 66AK2H06, 66AK2H12, AM5K2E02 and AM5K2E04, all based on the KeyStone multicore architecture. With KeyStone’s low latency, high bandwidth multicore shared memory controller (MSMC), these new SoCs yield 50 percent higher memory throughput when compared to other RISCbased SoCs.

The unique combination of Cortex-A15 processors and C66x DSP cores, with built-in packet processing and Ethernet switching, is designed to efficiently offload and enhance the cloud’s first generation general purpose servers; servers that struggle with big data applications like high performance computing and video processing.