Embedded Processor Watch

Editor: Cary D. Snyder

Contributors to this issue: Max Baron, Kevin Krewell, Markus Levy, Peter Glaskowsky, and Cary Snyder.

In This Issue:

• Editorial—Competing for the Palmtop
• Motorola Ships 1GHz PowerPC
• Network Processors Mature in 2001
• Faster & Wider Performance Paths
• Technology 2001: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
• Best DSP IP Cores of 2001
• The Best DSPs of 2001
• AMD Acquires Alchemy to Make Gold in Embedded Markets
• Best Processors Vie for Gold
• 2001 PC Survivor Challenge
• Of Special Interest:
  Embedded Processor Forum 2002
  Keynotes by Sir Robin Saxby—Executive Chairman, ARM
  and John Bourgoin—Chairman and CEO, MIPS Technologies

Editorial—Competing for the Palmtop
By Max Baron {2/25/02-02}

If the PC word processor has replaced the typewriter, and the spreadsheet has replaced tabulation sheets, then the palmtop has effectively replaced the little calendar book. The definition of a palmtop is vague. Some vendors call their products "palmtops"; others use such descriptors as "handheld" or "personal digital assistant" (PDA). Instead of trying to define what is and what is not a palmtop, consider the Palm Pilot and the similar market-visible devices that compete with it. I believe the palmtop's evolution has reached a turning point, brought about by recent microprocessor introductions and company acquisitions.

Born in 1996 at Palm, Inc., one year after the company's acquisition by U.S. Robotics Corp., the Palm Pilot became popular and can be credited with the resurgence of handheld computing. Light and useful, the Palm Pilot provided a daily and monthly calendar—good place to enter appointments, expenses, addresses, telephone numbers, and short notes. All you had to do was fork out a few hundred dollars and learn to write in a somewhat new set of characters—and you could throw out your five-dollar paper calendar.

The Palm Pilot was originally powered by a 16MHz Motorola 68K-based DragonBall chip that, after two frequency jumps, attained today's breathtaking speed of 33MHz—enough, however, to process simple handwriting and data entered by stylus. A handful of games could be played on the palmtop's screen, the few available pixels reminders of the early days of Atari.

Then came improvements. Screen contrast was improved, so you could actually see what you were writing under less-than-intense light. This improvement generated more revenue than expected for the manufacturer, because the Palm now cleverly came in a slim, attractive metal case and featured built-in rechargeable batteries. (Discard system when batteries fail?)

The new palmtop's price was close to $500, and it provided roughly the same features as the less-expensive one, its sales a marketing success that should be studied in universities. Palm and licensees began to compete with each other in transforming the palmtop into a piece of jewelry akin to the digital watch. Whose product would look better, be slimmer and lighter, and have more accessories to pull out of leather bags to elicit "Ooh!" s and "Aah!"s from envious friends and relatives?

In April 2000, Compaq, undaunted by its former failure with Win CE PDAs, introduced the iPAQ, a handheld (Compaq's term for a palmtop) that used Microsoft's Pocket PC OS to deliver a sophisticated set of applications, quality graphics, generous backlighting, device and memory expandability, connectivity, and, most important, compatibility with the higher-end Microsoft Office programs. The processor that made it all possible was Intel's StrongARM, designed at Digital and running at 206MHz. The iPAQ drained batteries faster, and it was heavier than a Palm, but comparing it with the first Palm Pilot was like comparing a PC to an Atari box. Compaq and Microsoft had defined a new generation of performance, luxury, and expensive palmtops. Casio, HP, and others offered similar devices.

Palmtop features and performance are becoming the next competitive frontier. A high-performance processor must have a place to store large files of instructions and data. The Pocket PC group had StrongARM performance and had already incorporated large internal memory and expansion slots. The Palm OS team needed higher performance and increased memory resources.

Motorola came to the rescue. The announcement of its ARM 9-cored DragonBall MX at 200MHz underscored the news of its architectural license purchase from ARM. DragonBall, StrongARM, and TI's TMS320VC5470 (DSP and ARM on one chip) can make ARM, the architecture, the target of applications and operating systems for handheld devices. While we were still wondering about what we'd see on the palmtop—a little house, a rectangle marked "Start," or a tiny penguin—Intel announced new StrongARM technology: the XScale-based PXA250, running at up to 400MHz, and the less-expensive PXA210.

Intel's announcement came just days after AMD's confirmation that it has acquired Alchemy Semiconductors. AMD is building a group of more than 300 people to focus on high performance at low power, beginning with the 500MHz, 32-bit MIPS-based Au1000. The MIPS low-power technology is no stranger to palmtops: the recent BE-300 Cassiopeia boasts a 64-bit MIPS-architecture NEC VR4131 chip that can run at up to 250MHz (230mW). The Cassiopeia clocks the chip at 166MHz to run Microsoft's Win CE 3.0 OS on a high-quality color palmtop that, on good sale days, goes for $149.

Microprocessor frequencies of 400-500MHz, soon to be seen in palmtops, were the highest ones could buy in Pentium PCs three years ago. The recommended PC internal memory of those times, 64MB, has already been replicated in Pocket PC 2002 palmtops. Price-wise and technology-wise, the palmtop is still far from enabled to fully use a 500MHz processor in the same way the PC did. Handhelds' disk storage capacity still has a long way to go. Battery capacity needs development (fuel cells?). As for connectivity: At the time of this writing, wireless services, at $39.99 per month, annually equal the price of one new top-of-the-line palmtop.

At the high end, we should expect pricey new high-performance palmtops—some delivered in expensive packages. At the low end, decreasing prices can bring some palmtops to well below the $100 pricetag. At CompUSA recently, I saw two 11-year-old kids discussing the merits of different styli for their Palms. Handspring is offering a joystick attachment for its palmtops. Will there soon be a palmtop equivalent of the digital plastic wristwatch?

Introductions of high-performance microprocessors, powerful operating systems and application software will continue to provide high-performance luxury palmtops for those who like them and can afford them. Competition will lower the prices of the other palmtops and the microprocessors inside them. The palmtop can come within a range that schoolchildren can afford. It can become their game and music platform—and a new tool for learning.

Motorola Ships 1GHz PowerPC
Demonstrates Benefits of High MHz and Triple-Issue Architecture
By Markus Levy {2/19/02-01}

The bar keeps getting higher, but it doesn’t seem that long ago that a gigahertz processor was just a semiconductor vendor’s dream. Most recently, Motorola announced its 1GHz MPC7455 and actually claims to be shipping it in production-level quantities. Obviously, this is no small feat and has required extensive circuit tuning, but the high speed is primarily helped along by Motorola’s silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process.

The processor’s 1GHz operating frequency translates into outstanding performance. The chip’s performance was so good that Motorola relied on the certification standards of EEMBC to prove the MPC7455’s benchmark scores. (Note that this also represents Motorola’s first public disclosure of certified out-of-the-box results on EEMBC benchmarks.) Motorola published scores for all five of the application areas (automotive, consumer, networking, office automation, and telecommunications). (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0219/160701.html ).

Network Processors Mature in 2001
Gigabit Chips Ship as Designers Look Forward to 10Gb/s
By Peter N. Glaskowsky {2/19/02-02}

The future of network processors (NPU), which looked bright in 2000, dimmed significantly last year. Previously high levels of spending for Internet infrastructure declined dramatically as part of the overall economic slowdown, reducing demand for the chips that manage high-end network switches and routers.

Several vendors will soon reach the next major milestone in this industry, shipping network processors able to manage dataflows at 10Gb/s (OC-192) or higher. Only one such chip, however, is now available: Terago’s proNP 5010 began sampling in January 2002, making it the first NPU at this performance level. The 5010 arrived a month too late to be eligible for our Analysts’ Choice awards, but Terago deserves special recognition for its accomplishment.

We nominated five products for the Microprocessor Report Analysts’ Choice Award for Best Network Processor of 2001: Agere’s Payload Plus, AMCC’s nP7250, IBM’s PowerNP NP4GS3, Motorola’s C-Port C-5, and Vitesse’s IQ2000.

Narrowing the choice to just one was not easy, but, in the end, there was only one choice to be made. For its superior architecture and performance, we give the nod to IBM’s PowerNP NP4GS3 as the winner of the Microprocessor Report Analysts’ Choice Award for Best Network Processor of 2001. The NP4GS3 best exemplifies the combination of flexibility and raw speed that makes network processors so important to the future growth of the Internet. (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0219/160702.html ).

Faster & Wider Performance Paths
Analysts Eye Best Embedded Processor Core
By Cary D. Snyder {2/19/02-03}

Embedded processors have long eclipsed PC processors in units sold but have always lagged them in performance. The sales lead of embedded chips will only widen, but the performance gap is definitely closing. Our nominations this year for the Analysts’ Choice Award for High-Performance Embedded-Processor Core reflect the growing need of embedded systems to run software that is as complex and performance-hungry as PC applications are.

We at Microprocessor Report have recognized the importance of assessing real-world embedded performance in a wide variety of applications by creating an Analysts’ Choice Award for a High-Performance Embedded Processor Core. Defining a high-performance embedded-processor core is only part of a complicated and sometimes subjective analytical process. We limited our nomination list to those embedded-processor cores that shipped to customers in 2001 and, according to our analysis, appear most likely to solve the most difficult SoC design challenges. This year’s nominees for the best high-performance embedded-processor core are ARM’s 1020E, MIPS Technologies’ MIPS64 20Kc, and Tensilica’s Xtensa.

The most valuable high-performance embedded-processor cores are those that are easiest to integrate into SoC applications and that deliver the highest performance for the intended application while preserving computational-processing headroom. One core leads the rest in balancing performance requirements for high-end embedded applications. We give the Microprocessor Report Analysts’ Choice Award for Best High-Performance Embedded- Processor Core of 2001 to MIPS Technologies’ MIPS64 20Kc core. (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0219/160703.html ).

Technology 2001: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
By Max Baron {2/25/02-01}

Unlike products that can be evaluated by comparing them to their competition and by assessing their usefulness at a given time, technologies offer a glimpse into a probable future and are defined by the likelihood of their becoming reality. At MPR, our world consists of microprocessors, digital-signal processors, and application-specific digital engines and the ways they will be created, programmed, and used in the future. Will they transform life as profoundly as the internal combustion engine, the jet plane, the computer, and the Internet? Will they be successful, useful, and accepted? Some technologies seem to have a sure short-term impact. Others, like icebergs in time, may extend their mass forever. Technology nominations and the ultimate Annual Award are MPR analysts’ votes for the future, glimpses into what might happen and what processors might be feasible. This year’s limelight is shining on logic and architecture design technologies.

Technologies can’t appear overnight; their roots are in accumulated scientific knowledge and methods and the hopes of many contributors-universities and other organizations. It is with this humble understanding that we limited our search to technologies that were recently presented by commercial companies or used by them to create test products.

The analyst staff of MPR recognizes the following technologies as nominees for the Annual Award for Outstanding Technology in the Field of Digital Processing: Theseus Logic’s NULL Convention Logic, Sun Microsystems Laboratories’ Asynchronous Technology, Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, and Proceler’s Soft Hardware technology. (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0225/160801.html ).

Best DSP IP Cores of 2001
DSP Cores Suit a Variety of Performance Requirements
By Markus Levy {2/25/02-03}

We continue our roundup of the MPR Analysts’ Choice Awards for the best microprocessors of 2001 by saluting the nominees for Best DSP IP Cores of the year. Nominees for the Analysts’ Choice Award for Best DSP IP Core of 2001 are the BOPS WirelessRay, LSI Logic’s ZSP400, Siroyan’s OneDSP, 3DSP’s UniPHY, and Infineon’s Carmel 1000. (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0225/160803.html ).

The Best DSPs of 2001
DSP Chips Vie for Top Spot
By Markus Levy {2/11/02-02}

In 2001, the technology behind digital-signal processors continued to evolve, but the number of new DSP announcements reached an all-time low. Most vendors spent a large portion of their resources polishing their existing products and getting ready for the future. Applications that include VoIP, wireless base stations, and wireless LAN should offer better opportunities in 2002 and beyond.

In previous years, MPR maintained a single category for best DSP of the year, grouping intellectual property cores and chips together. After reviewing the criteria for selecting the best DSP, however, it became obvious that there are enough significant factors to distinguish the two alternatives. In addition, many criteria are important to both categories, including overall value, innovativeness, performance and operating frequency, power consumption, price, product and architectural roadmap, and development tools. Despite the quantitative measures listed above, selecting the best DSP is also a matter of qualitative analysis, and all the nominees have excellent attributes.

The nominees for Analysts' Choice Award for Best DSP Chip of 2001 are Analog Devices' Blackfin 21535, Analog Devices' TigerSHARC TS101S, LSI Logic's LSI402ZX, and Texas Instruments' C6414. (Motorola's 8102, available 1H02, will be a strong contender for the Analysts' Choice Award for Best DSP Chip of 2002.) (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0211/160602.html ).

AMD Acquires Alchemy to Make Gold in Embedded Markets
By Max Baron {3/4/02-01}

On February 6, 2002, a half-dozen years after dropping its successful 29000 embedded products, AMD announced that recent rumors were true: It had agreed to acquire Alchemy Semiconductor, founded in 1999. AMD completed the acquisition on February 19, 2002. The acquisition was structured as a cash transaction: AMD paid approximately $50 million to Alchemy stockholders and outstanding creditors. (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0304/160901.html ).

Best Processors Vie for Gold
Comparing High-Performance Embedded Processors
By Cary D. Snyder {3/11/02-01}

General-purpose embedded processors are undergoing evolutionary technological transformations that are turning them into machines of efficiency. Increases in the integration and performance of embedded-processor chips must provide both higher performance and reduced power consumption. The visible attention last year’s electrical power shortages received has forced vendors to confront issues of optimizing embedded-system power consumption. Designing high-performance embedded-processor chips, however, has always meant balancing the goals of high performance, low cost, and low power consumption.

Microprocessor Report’s analyst team has limited its nomination list to those processor chips that shipped to customers or sampled in 2001. This year’s nominees for the Analysts’ Choice Award for Best High-Performance Embedded-Processor Chip are Broadcom’s BCM1250, IBM’s PowerPC 750FX, Motorola’s MPC7455, NEC’s VR5500, and PMC-Sierra’s RM9000x2. (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0311/161001.html ).

2001 PC Survivor Challenge
AMD and Intel Continue Battle, Transmeta Hits Glitch
By Kevin Krewell {2/11/02-01}

<<< Editor’s Note: Both Intel and Transmeta are coming out with embedded versions of its PC processors and are therefore deemed of interest to the embedded market. >>>

The year 2001 was a tough odyssey for the PC industry—a year in which the market contracted and average selling prices (ASP) suffered. After Intel released the long-awaited Pentium 4 in 2000, it became, in 2001, the industry's first PC processor to reach 2GHz. Intel also began transitioning to the 0.13-micron semiconductor process about nine months ahead of AMD. AMD rolled out the Palomino core and resurrected an updated version of the performance-numbering (P-rating) scheme to keep pace with the Pentium 4's higher clock speeds. Transmeta and VIA also made some news in 2001, offering 0.13-micron processors during the year; at last count, however, the two companies together accounted for only about 1% of the market. (The full version of this article is available online to Microprocessor Report subscribers at http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0211/160601.html ).

Upcoming Special Event of Interest

Embedded Processor Forum 2002

Look for special event highlights in the next EPW issue!

This year's keynote speakers are:
Sir Robin Saxby—Executive Chairman from ARM and John Bourgoin—Chairman and CEO from MIPS Technologies.

Embedded Processor Forum is the embedded industry's most important week of the year is April 29 - May 2nd here in San Jose, California. Embedded Processor Forum is the professional's conference for embedded computing technology. Focused exclusively on microprocessors and related hardware technologies that are driving the embedded industry, the forum is the most important place in the industry to present and hear new chip announcements.

Whether you're designing networks, information appliances, or computer games…whether your application requires low power, high performance, or DSP technology…Embedded Processor Forum gives you the in-depth technical information you need to make a winning embedded decision.

Presented by Cahners In-Stat/MicroDesign Resources

Register on line at www.MDRonline.com/epf/register or call 480-483-4441 (in Arizona)