Freescale to Incorporate AltiVec Technology into Its QorIQ Family of Multicore Products

Freescale Semiconductor plans to incorporate its proven and highly successful AltiVec vector processing technology into the multicore QorIQ product family.

AltiVec addresses high-bandwidth data processing and algorithmic-intensive computations, delivering DSP-level performance for control and data path processing tasks. Benchmarks conducted by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) have demonstrated 10x performance improvements with AltiVec technology.

QorIQ products featuring AltiVec technology are expected to deliver dramatic performance and energy efficiency boosts for a wide range of applications including the wireless infrastructure, networking, aerospace, military, industrial, robotics, storage, medical, video systems and printing markets.

“Incorporating AltiVec technology into future QorIQ products is expected to deliver distinct performance benefits for our customers, while further demonstrating the advantages of Freescale’s highly advanced approach to embedded multicore,” said Brett Butler, vice president and general manager of the Networking Processor Division at Freescale. “AltiVec’s performance has long been recognized for the value it delivers to the industry and we are pleased to introduce it into the QorIQ product roadmap.”

AltiVec extends Power Architecture® technology to leverage single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) vector processing. AltiVec technology adds more than 180 instructions that operate concurrently with scalar integer and floating-point instructions. The additional instructions provide inter- and intra-vector integer and floating-point arithmetic, as well as powerful logical, conditional, permutation, and data movement functions. The rich AltiVec technology instruction set enables highly power-efficient processing capabilities for a broad spectrum of markets.

“Freescale’s decision to incorporate proven AltiVec technology into its QorIQ product family makes QorIQ an attractive choice for a wide range of markets,” said Joseph Byrne, senior analyst at The Linley Group and chairman of the Linley Technology Processor Conference. “This move is good news for QorIQ customers and the larger embedded community.” To help developers take advantage of the performance benefits of AltiVec technology, Freescale offers multiple downloadable ‘C’ libraries of AltiVec technology-enabled functions. Freescale also plans broad internal and third party development support for QorIQ products incorporating AltiVec technology.