AppliedMicro APM821xx GHz Processor ($20 for Q10,000)

Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, or AppliedMicro, in energy conscious computing and communications solutions, announced the APM 821xx processor, a single-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) device offering high performance, high integration and energy efficiency for multi-function storage applications and media servers for the connected digital home. The processor enables new levels of performance for NAS systems and media servers at reduced cost and reduced power consumption.

The APM 821xx processor offers up to 1GHz CPU speeds capable of delivering up to 2,000 DMIPS (Dhrystone Millions of Instructions per Second) of compute performance to enable storage platforms that can deliver more than 16 simultaneous streams of high definition video for home networking applications. AppliedMicro will feature the APM821xx family in a live NAS product demo at ESC Silicon Valley 2010, April 27 – 29.

“System providers in the NAS and media server space want high performance for their platforms, but they also want an optimized bill-of-materials (BOM) to reach price points that consumers find compelling,” said Gopi Sirineni, Vice President of SMB and Consumer Business for AppliedMicro. “AppliedMicro’s APM821xx family is ideal for this market because it can deliver outstanding networked storage performance with additional floating point acceleration for these cost-sensitive applications. End-users in the NAS market want new features, such as dynamic media archiving and retrieval, security and scalability and the APM821xx family delivers them with energy efficiency.”

Home networking adoption in the US has passed the 50 percent mark and the Consumer Network Storage (CNS) market alone will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 40 percent between 2009 and 2014, according to a recent report by industry research firm In-Stat.

“There is a tremendous amount of digital content coming into the home, whether it’s music, photos or video content and it is being created by a range of portable devices, from optical disc, terrestrial sources, antenna, satellite and the Internet,” said Norm Bogen, VP Research, Digital Entertainment, for In-Stat. “In the meantime, there are a number of devices in the home that access this content and right now, they are largely single-purpose devices with little interconnectivity between them. OEMs are looking to take advantage of this need with devices that store all the content and deliver it seamlessly to multiple users simultaneously. Cost points have made it difficult to gain traction, but AppliedMicro’s ability to deliver performance at reduced costs could bring more robustness to the Consumer Network Storage market.”

A high-degree of integration on the device, including a TCP/IP offload engine for networking applications and on-chip RAID 5 acceleration, reduces system part counts and board space for developers and helps them meet BOM goals. The APM821xx family also features a 128-bit high-bandwidth bus architecture with integrated PCI-Express, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 OTG interfaces. Best-in-class power dissipation is typically less than 3.5 watts in operational settings and less than 0.6W in standby situations. The chip is based on a Power Architecture 464 processor core with 256 KB Level 2 cache, FPU, 16-bit or 32-bit DDR-2 SDRAM memory controller, integrated turbo security engine and NAND Flash controller.

“QNAP’s entry-level NAS servers make ideal choices for home and SOHO users due to an outstanding performance-to-price ratio,” said Richard Lee, President of QNAP Systems, Inc. “When you consider that the device can be a file server, home media server, host websites, and backup all the computers on the network, it’s a fantastic value. AppliedMicro’s APM 821xx processor family has the robust performance metrics that our systems require to enable new feature sets, yet it meets the criteria for bill-of-materials costs for price-sensitive applications.”

Customer Enablement
AppliedMicro enables an ecosystem of tools and software support designed to help customers to accelerate time to market and lower development costs. The range of solutions for the APM821xx family includes evaluation kits, validation boards, and comprehensive NAS reference designs. Third party support for development tools is available from sources such as Abatron, WindRiver, Lauterbauch, and Green Hills.

Pricing and Availability
Samples of the AppliedMicro’s APM821xx are available now, and production quantities are expected in the second quarter. Packaging is in a ROHS compliant, 18mm X 18mm, 345-ball FBGA. Limited sample quantities of the APM821xx family are available at less than $20 for quantities of 10,000 pieces.