amiga-news.de - Marvell and IBM Announce Extension of Discovery System Controllers to PPC 970

15.Sep.2003
Marc Cloppenburg / AMIGAplus (ICQ) Marvell and IBM Announce Extension of Discovery System Controllers to PPC 970
Marvell and IBM today announced a relationship to accelerate the adoption of IBM PowerPC 970 processors in next-generation networking, storage and server systems. As part of the agreement, Marvell plans to extend its market-leading family of Discovery™ chipsets with new system controllers that include IBM's high-speed PowerPC 970 Elastic Interface technology.

The combination of IBM's PowerPC 970 microprocessor, with speeds up to 2 GHz, and Marvell's Discovery 970 system controller is intended to provide embedded customers with a comprehensive and cost effective 64 bit sub-system solution. In conjunction with Marvell's Gigabit PHY, Serial ATA and high-speed switching products, Marvell and IBM now offer a complete solution base for next generation embedded applications.

Marvell plans to make samples of its Discovery 970 chipsets available in the first quarter of 2004. IBM plans to make its PowerPC 970 processor available in the first quarter of 2004.

"Marvell's decision to team up with IBM and extend their support of PowerPC is a tremendous piece of good news for the Embedded marketplace," said Lisa Su, director of PowerPC and emerging products, IBM Microelectronics. "The combination of their Discovery 970 with our PowerPC 970 should yield the most powerful, scalable and flexible solution available in the Embedded system marketplace."

"We are very excited to team with IBM to provide our customers with what we expect to be the most powerful PowerPC sub-system architectures ever designed," said Balaji Baktha, General Manager of Storage and Consumer Division, Marvell Semiconductor. "IBM and Marvell are committed to working closely with leading OEMs to drive the development of next generation networking, server and storage applications."

Marvell Discovery 970 System Controller:
The Marvell Discovery product family represents the most widely adopted system and communication controllers in the industry. The Discovery 970 system controller integrates several I/O peripherals on-chip, including Gigabit Ethernet, PCI-X bridges, storage functions and DDR memory interface. The Discovery 970 is software compatible with the existing Marvell system controllers helping to preserve customer software investments while accelerating development cycles.

IBM PowerPC 970:
The IBM PowerPC 970 is derived from IBM's award-winning POWER4 server processor to provide high performance and additional function for users. As the first in a new family of high-end PowerPC processors, the chip is designed to manipulate data in larger, 64-bit chunks and accelerate compute-intensive workloads like multimedia and graphics through specialized circuitry, known as a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) unit. IBM packs performance and new features into the chip using ultra-thin 0.13-micron circuitry (nearly 800 times thinner than a human hair), constructed of copper wiring and about 52 million transistors based on IBM's efficient silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. (nba) (Translation: sk)

[News message: 15. Sep. 2003, 19:04] [Comments: 0]
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