AUTOMOTIVE

Previously announced network processors and SoCs from other ARC customers have packed as many as 16 ARC cores on a single chip. The NPE10 far surpasses that level of chip integration. Internet Machines plans to disclose more details about the NPE10 -- including the exact number of ARC cores in the design -- shortly before delivering the chip early in 2002. "We chose the ARC microprocessor core because it was very small and easy to work with," said Chris Haywood, vice president of engineering at Internet Machines. "It has great performance per gate and is easy to configure and extend. We liked the auxiliary register space, which provides a direct, fast, inside-the-pipeline interface to hardware. Close integration with hardware was the essential requirement. The ARC core is much more open to low-level hardware interfacing than other configurable processor cores." The NPE10 can look deeply into packet headers to analyze, prioritize, and tag incoming streams of network traffic while forwarding the packets toward their destinations. It can simultaneously support multiple types of protocols and services on different subchannels. Yet despite its powerful architecture, the NPE10 is easy to use. It has a straightforward, single-threaded programming model that simplifies design integration, and programmers can use familiar, off-the-shelf GNU compilers, assemblers, and other development tools. Industry analysts are praising the NPE10. Eric Mantion, senior analyst for networking technology at Cahners In-Stat, said the NPE10 "will be hitting the market at the sweet spot of the curve, just as the OC-192 NPU market starts climbing rapidly to $2.8 billion in 2005. Internet Machines understands the two most important -- but often overlooked -- truths of the network processor world: without well-written software and a strong connection to a flexible switch fabric, an NPU is just an expensive, eight-gram paperweight." As many embedded-system developers are discovering, the user-customizable ARCtangent(TM) core lends itself to powerful multiprocessor designs. "While some competing vendors are only now introducing features to make their cores suitable for complex SoC designs, the ARCtangent core and our software-development tools have supported large-scale chip multiprocessing for a long time," said Wasim Ahmed, product marketing manager.