AMCC Unveils Advanced PowerPC Storage Processor

Applied Micro Circuits Corporation announced the newest member of its storage processor family, the PowerPC(R) 460SX. Based on the Power Architecture standard, the PowerPC 460SX storage processor integrates a PowerPC core and specialized functions for high-performance storage and storage networking applications.

With a rich feature set and high performance, the PowerPC 460SX is designed to meet the demanding requirements of server direct-attached and external storage applications. The unique combination of high-performance IO and memory subsystems also make the PowerPC 460SX ideal for high-bandwidth protocol bridging applications.

The PowerPC 460SX, with clock frequencies ranging from 833MHz to 1.4GHz, provides multiple PCI Express Gen 2 interfaces for high bandwidth peripheral connectivity and efficient PCIe to PCIe bridging. For storage applications, the PowerPC 460SX provides high throughput RAID 5 and RAID 6 hardware-acceleration support capable of achieving 1500MB/s RAID 5 and 1400MB/s RAID 6 full stripe write performance. It also includes XTS-AES and GCM-AES encryption acceleration that is compliant with the IEEE 1619 and 1619.1 standards. For network attachment, the PowerPC 460SX includes four GbE Ethernet MACs, TCI/IP assist, QoS and a crypto engine for IPSec and SSL. With these features, the PowerPC 460SX can improve both system performance and data security, by performing RAID 5 and RAID 6 parity calculations while at the same time encrypting and decrypting data in transit and data at rest.

"AMCC’s PowerPC 460SX takes storage processors to a new level. Its extensive I/O connectivity, high CPU performance, RAID5/6 and encryption engines, low power consumption, and feature integration make this processor well suited for a wide range of storage applications," said Linley Gwennap, Principal Analyst of The Linley Group. "Combined with AMCC’s hardware-accelerated RAID-on-Linux technology, the new PowerPC 460SX provides customers with a complete system solution for seamless integration."

To support the high bandwidth transactions, the PowerPC 460SX features two internal buses that support simultaneous read/write operations for a combined total of 19.2 GBytes/s of peak bandwidth. This bus topology enables concurrent transactions for write data to memory, read data from memory, encrypt/decrypt data, and computation of RAID parities.

"Customers are demanding high-performance, feature-rich storage solutions which increase throughput while lowering power consumption," said Sam Fuller, Vice President of Marketing for AMCC. "Our new storage processor enables new storage systems to take full advantage of the new 6G SAS and 8G Fibre Channel technologies and maintains AMCC’s performance and feature leadership in storage processing."

Samples of the PowerPC 460SX will be available in 3Q08.

For more information on this and other AMCC storage processors