i/oZONE Products for the week of October 6, 2003
Marvell Says . . .
I/O R' Us -- Marvell's Discovery III System Controllers
Target High-Performance Storage, Networking, And Peripheral Markets
Marvell has announced the industry's fastest system controller architecture for MIPS and PowerPC processor-based systems. Building upon Marvell's industry-standard Discovery platform, the new Discovery III devices are optimally designed for a broad range of applications, from sophisticated routers, switches and wireless base stations to high-volume storage and laser printer applications. These innovative, feature-rich devices have received broad support from industry's leading CPU vendors such as IBM, Motorola, and PMC-Sierra.
The Discovery III family is the industry's first to support 200 MHz interface for next generation high performance PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. The six devices in the Discovery III family offer a rich feature mix incorporating a 100 Gbps non-blocking crossbar architecture, advanced communications peripherals and optimized interfaces, setting new technology benchmarks for performance and integration. Additionally, the Discovery III integrates RAID engines to accelerate next generation storage applications.
"Since its launch in December 2000, the Discovery family of system controllers has been established as the market leader with multiple design wins", said Balaji Baktha, Marvell's General Manager for the Embedded and Emerging Products Business Unit. "The Marvell Discovery III family offers multiple devices with a wide range of features that enable high performance systems as well as cost effective high-volume applications".
"IBM PowerPC embedded microprocessors offer superior performance, scalability, integration and power efficiency for demanding applications, said Lisa Su, Director of Power PC and Emerging Products, IBM Microelectronics. "Marvell's new Discovery III system controller combined with IBM's PowerPC 750GX microprocessor offers embedded system designers a high-performance solution for demanding next-generation applications."
"We are excited about the availability of Marvell's new Discovery III development system because it fully leverages the SMP capabilities of our MPC7455/57 PowerPC processors and MPX bus protocols to speed up overall system performance," said Glenn Beck, Marketing Manager for Motorola's Computing Platforms Division. "Marvell and Motorola have a long history of delivering complementary solutions that benefit our respective customers. The innovative architecture of Discovery III enables system designers to develop cutting-edge solutions for next-generation applications based on Motorola's high-performance PowerPC processors."
"Marvell's new Discovery III system controller offers a level of performance and integration ideal for building high-performance MIPS-based subsystems," said Tom Riordan, Vice President and General Manager of PMC-Sierra's Microprocessor Products Division. "When paired with PMC-Sierra's powerful single or dual 1 GHz RM9000 family processors or the RM5200 and RM7000 family processors, the market now has a new best-of-breed solution with leading edge, no compromise performance."
Comprehensive Development Tools
Marvell offers complete development platforms for the Discovery III devices,
enabling customers to start system development without waiting for their
own hardware. Development platforms are available for popular MIPS and PowerPC
processors including IBM750GX, Motorola MPC7457 and PMC Sierra RM9000. 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 is doing a good job of leveraging the strengths of the controller business acquired when they bought Galileo a few years back to broaden its already-extensive networking portfolio. They realized that the speed and performance of MIPS and PowerPC controllers is approaching and exceeding the 1 GHz barrier, and that a system's I/O must keep pace to keep from choking the system processor. Marvell's latest introduction, the Discovery III is the first of a new series of controllers that can handle controller-CPU bus speeds of up to 200 MHz -- up from the 133 MHz for the Discovery II series.
Targeted for use in high-performance routers, switches, SAN, wireless infrastructure, telco equipment, and laser printers the controller takes on the jobs normally done by the North and South bridge functions in laptops. This includes PCI-to-PXI-X bridges, CPU bridges, DMA controller/timer, functions, as well as Ethernet MAC and serial controllers.
One of the keys to the Discovery's performance is the time-arbitrated crossbar that is used to link a MIPS or PowerPC processor to PCI and PCI-X busses, memory, up to three /100/1000Ethernet MACs, and a wide range of system I/O (See Figure). The switch's total capacity of 100 Gbit/s is divided up into 16 time slots that can provide any-to-any connectivity between any two elements. It also isolates activity between nodes, allowing other parts of the chip to interact.
The crossbar arrangement allows any processing element or I/O connection to be directed to any other port for as many portions of the 16-slot cycle as desired. Likewise, memory can be shared between the CPU and DMA controller at will. Marvell says that their improved crossbar-CPU interface avoids the delays other controllers experience when its CPU bus is tied up working with the processor. From what I can see, this arrangement should allow fine-tuning of performance by allocating bandwidth between ports by programming crossbar to allocate a larger proportion of its bandwidth to priority operations.
The 2-Mbyte of fast memory sitting at the CPU interface saves several cycles over fetching from memory. This provides quick access to critical data (such as say, packet descriptors) to allow the CPU to maintain performance. And speaking of memory, the Discovery III memory interface supports both DDR and FCRAM.
The Discovery III has been sampling for three months, with production scheduled for November. A follow-on ('970 controller) will also have the new EIO (Elastic I/O) technology developed by IBM and support for a 2.5 GHz PowerPC bus is expected in early 2004.
Depending on the bus speed and features you want, high-volume pricing will range between sub-$40 to $75.
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