RapidIO Offers Many Processor Choices

By Tom Cox, RapidIO Trade Association

RapidIO®, the low latency, high performance interconnect, is now easy to implement with many processors. Some designers think RapidIO works only with PowerPC or digital signal processor (DSP) farms, but in reality it is broadly supported for MIPS, ARM, PPC, and many DSP and programmable logic based processors. Several DSP and processor vendors have recently announced RapidIO support based on strong OEM demand.

For example:

• AMCC’s 460GT PowerPC, with speeds of up to 1GHz, is ideally suited for storage and networking applications. It is now qualified to RIOLAB Level 2 and 3 device interoperability.
• LSI’s Axxia Communication Processor family, the ACP3448 processor, features four powerful PowerPC 476FP processor cores.
• LSI’s StarCoreTM DSP cores, the four-core SP2704 and the sixteen-core SP2716, can scale to more than 3,000 simultaneous media gateway channels.
• Mindspeed's Transcede 4000 device includes a Quad-MPCore and a Dual-MPCore Cortex A9 in advanced 40-nm process technology. The device is the first in a planned family of system-on-chip (SoC) solutions based on the Cortex A9.   
• Cavium's OCTEON multi-core MIPS64(R) processor family consists of processors with 1 to 32 cores on a single chip integrated with industry leading hardware acceleration. It is well-suited to packet processing, quality of service, TCP, security, compression / decompression, and pattern matching applications.
• NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core multi-threaded XLS processors contain more powerful MIPS processors, with both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures supporting frequencies from 300MHz to 1.3GHz.
• Wintegra’s WinPath3 is commonly found on AMCC cards paired with DSPs. Wintegra's unique heterogeneous multi-core design has up to twelve multi-threaded data path cores, an integrated 20 Gigabit/second hardware packet classifier, and dual multi-threaded MIPS 34K CPU cores.
• The latest Freescale DSP builds on the success of the six-core MSC8156 device with an enhanced Acceleration Engine and new interconnect technologies.
• TI has a new multicore system-on-a-chip architecture that delivers 5X performance. Based on TI’s multicore DSPs, it integrates fixed and floating point capabilities.

Furthermore, designers should not ignore the FPGA based end points.  Altera, Xilinx, and Lattice offer DSP and processor cores for developing high performance custom solutions.

RapidIO solutions are thus readily available for a wide variety of processors. Designers working on communications, signal processing, networking, security, military/defense, and other applications can easily include RapidIO in their high-speed, high-performance systems, regardless of whether they are using PowerPC, MIPS, ARM, DSP, or FPGA architectures. 

Tom Cox is Executive Director of the RapidIO Trade Association. You can reach him at tom.cox@rapidio.org.

RapidIO is a trademark of the RapidIO Trade Association.