Titan was a planned family of
32-bit Power ISA-based
microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...
cores designed by
Applied Micro Circuits Corporation
Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (also known as AppliedMicro, AMCC or APM) was a fabless semiconductor company designing network and embedded Power ISA (including a Power ISA license), and server processor ARM (including an ARMv8-A license), ...
(AMCC), but was scrapped in 2010. Applied Micro chose to continue development of the
PowerPC 400
The PowerPC 400 family is a line of 32-bit embedded RISC processor cores based on the PowerPC or Power ISA instruction set architectures. The cores are designed to fit inside specialized applications ranging from system-on-a-chip (SoC) mi ...
core instead, on a 40 nm fabrication process.
Details
It was designed to be the foundation of
embedded processors and
system-on-a-chip
A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...
(SoC) solutions. While being high performance, reaching speeds up to 2 GHz, it would remain extremely power efficient, drawing just 2.5 W per
core
Core or cores may refer to:
Science and technology
* Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages
* Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding
* Core (optical fiber), the signal-carrying portion of an optical fiber
* Core, the centra ...
. Where there usually is a trade-off between performance and power, AMCC used the ''Fast14'' technology from
Intrinsity
Intrinsity was a privately held Austin, Texas based fabless semiconductor company; it was founded in 1997 as ''EVSX'' on the remnants of Exponential Technology and changed its name to Intrinsity in 2000. It had around 100 employees and supplied too ...
to build an extremely efficient microprocessor design leveraging high performance combined with low power and comparably cheap bulk 90 nm
CMOS manufacturing. By using
NMOS transistors and no
latches, the design results in a chip with fewer transistors than traditional design, thus reducing cost. The design allows for
dual core
A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such ...
SoC implementations consuming less than 15 W. There were plans for single, dual and quad-core versions.
The Titan had a new superscalar, out of order 8-9 stage core with a novel three-stage
CPU cache
A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, whic ...
design. Small 4/4 KiB instruction and data caches at "level 0" sit before the traditional 32/32 KiB L1 caches up to 1 MB L2 cache that will be shared between all cores (supporting up to four). The Titan was compliant with the
Power ISA v.2.04.
Implementations
* APM 83290 – The first implementations of the Titan core design, codenamed Gemeni.
Two 1.5 GHz cores with
FPU, 512 kB shared L2 cache, DDR2 controller, security engine, multi-channel DMA and I/O engine for gigabit Ethernet, PCIe, USB, RapidIO and SATA. It began sampling in October 200
The processor is aimed at telecom and control plane applications. It is built using
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...
's 90 nm bulk CMOS fabrication to reduce cos
References
External links
AMCC's pressrelease{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080506105230/http://investor.amcc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=244596 , date=2008-05-06
AMCC Next Generation Power Architecture Processor – Titan – Power.orgAMCC drives to high end of embedded PowerPC market – EETimesIntrinsity Nets 2 GHz, 4000 DMIPS PowerPC FastCore – Market Wire
Embedded microprocessors
PowerPC microprocessors