i/oZONE Products for the week of September 27, 2004

Marvell Says…
Light Price, Heavy Performance: Marvell's Cost-Reduced System Controllers MIPS & PowerPC Systems Target High Volume Applications

Marvell has announced the Discovery LT, a high-performance, cost-effective system controller solution for high volume laser-printers, storage networking and other mass market applications. Building upon Marvell's industry-leading Discovery platform, the new Discovery LT devices provide a solution for the value-conscious applications, which demand performance but at a lower cost. These innovative, feature-rich devices have received broad support from industry's leading CPU vendors such as Freescale and PMC-Sierra.

The Discovery LT System Controllers, based on an innovative 100Gbps non-blocking cross architecture, integrates a 166 MHz CPU interface for MIPS and PowerPC CPUs, advanced communications peripherals and industry-standard I/O interfaces to enable cost-optimized system designs without compromising on performance. For users of custom ASICs and legacy system controllers, the Discovery LT offers a low-cost upgrade path to next generation features like DDR memory, Gigabit Ethernet and PCI-X interfaces without spending millions of dollars in ASIC re-design. Additionally, the Discovery LT integrates RAID engines to accelerate next generation storage applications.

"The introduction of the Discovery LT is another step in our continued commitment to bring industry leading features to the market and meet the performance needs of high volume applications," said Balaji Baktha, Marvell's Vice President and General Manager for the Embedded and Emerging Products Business Unit. "Discovery LT enables our customers to address a wider range of performance and cost-sensitive applications by leveraging their existing investment in Discovery architecture."

"Enabling cost-sensitive applications to take advantage of high-performance processors from Freescale, the new Discovery LT controller offers an innovative architecture, high levels of integration, and support of our advanced MPX bus protocols," said Bill Dunnigan, Vice President at Freescale Semiconductor and General Manager of Freescale's Computing Platform Division. "The combination of Freescale's high-performance MPC7447A processor and Discovery LT offers a solution with compelling price, low power and performance advantages."

"Marvell's new Discovery LT system controller, combined with IBM's PowerPC 750FX/GX microprocessor, offers embedded system designers the innovative architecture that enables their customers to build high-value, high-performance systems for their next-generation applications," said Ray Bryant, Director of Marketing for PowerPC and Emerging Products, IBM Systems and Technology Group-Technology. "A growing number of technology leaders are collaborating on the Power Architecture as part of IBM's Power Everywhere initiative. IBM's PowerPC embedded microprocessors offer superior performance, scalability, integration, and power efficiency for demanding applications."

"Marvell's new Discovery LT system controllers offer a high level of performance and integration for the value segment of the market," said John Monson, vice president of marketing for the Microprocessor Products Division at PMC-Sierra. "When combined with the high performance, low power and small foot print of PMC-Sierra's RM5261A, RM7065C, RM7000C and RM7965 64-bit MIPS-based microprocessors, the Discovery LT delivers a compelling solution for high volume, cost-sensitive applications"

Comprehensive Development Tools
Marvell offers complete development platforms for the Discovery LT devices, enabling customers to start system development without waiting for their own hardware. Development platforms are available for popular MIPS and PowerPC processors including IBM750FX, Freescale MPC7447A and PMC Sierra RM7000C. Complete reference design collateral including software drivers, board support package for VxWorks 5.5 and schematics are provided to accelerate customer development.


analogZONE Says . . .

Marvell's Discovery III series of high-performance system controllers (reviewed here last year) have carved out a solid niche for themselves in networking and large embedded computing applications where performance and flexibility were paramount concerns. Now the same group of designers are setting their sights on the higher volume markets that are emerging in items such as professional printers, enterprise switch management, wireless base station line cards raid controllers where cost is as much a consideration as performance. The new Discovery LT series of system controllers offers many of the same high-performance features for both PowerPC and MIPS-based systems, at a considerable cost savings.

The LT series still uses the same high-performance crossbar interconnect architecture that helped its predecessor win one of our 2003 Product of the Year awards, but some features have been removed that are not considered essential to the specific needs of the high-volume markets it's intended for. For example, it offers only one 133-MHz PC PCI -X interface (as opposed to two on the III), sports only one GigE interface (as opposed to up to three) found on the III series (See Figure). The LT controller also lacks the on-chip SRAM found on its high-performance brethren, so you may still have to use the III series if you absolutely need the faster access times that the local memory provided. About the only other slow-down on the chip is the CPU interface that runs at 166 MHz vs. the 200 MHz on the III series.

But in most respects the LT controller works much like previous discovery III series. It even retains the two Integrated XOR engines that are intended to offload redundancy check functions used in RAID applications from the host CPU. This makes the chips code-compatible with most of Marvell's existing reference libraries -- as well as any code you might have brewed up yourself for earlier designs.

Since the chips' pin-outs and functionality are not identical to the earlier models, the development tools and boards are a bit different. There are three development boards to support a range of IBM and Freescale PowerPC processors. The MIPS development platform uses an interchangeable CPU module to operate with either PMC-Sierra's RM70xx series or Raza Microelectronics' XL7100 processors. Typical of Marvell's emphasis on full support, both development systems are available with complete reference designs, data sheets, schematics, and software drivers. VxWorks images and other essential tools are also available.

The Discovery LT should help Marvell maintain its significant chunk of business in supplying controllers for enterprise switches and routers as well as expand its role in running high-performance printers. But I think that Marvell was especially smart to produce a product that will help designers meet the stringent cost and performance demands that the expanding sales volumes of networked storage devices will inevitably generate. While I'm usually skeptical of heavily-hyped trends, I think networked storage is something that's really re-shaping the nature of carrier, enterprise, and even small business computing.

My only question here is how quickly we'll see support for the PCI Express bus appear in the Discovery series of system controllers. Given the potential cost and performance advantages the serial bus technology offers, I'd say sooner would be smarter than later.

Marvell's new Discovery LT system controllers are sampling now, with production scheduled for December 2004. While Marvell would not give an exact price, they say that they expect low-volume pricing to be under $40: considerably lower than the sub-$60 pricing for equivalent volumes of a mid-range version of the Discovery III controller.

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