Freescale’s new PowerPC chip targets home media devices

Freescale Semiconductor hopes to move its 7400 series PowerPC processors beyond the telecommunications and industrial design markets with the fifth generation of the chip, announced Monday.

The MPC7448 will be unveiled at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando. The Austin, Texas, company built the 7448 chip on its 90-nanometer processing technology, which lowered the power consumption of the chip even as it reached faster clock speeds, said Glenn Beck, director of marketing for the MPC PowerPC processors.

Freescale, the former chip-making division of Motorola, sells most of its MPC7xxx series processors to networking and telecommunications equipment makers, which build the chips into blade servers, routers and other embedded devices. In this world, power consumption is an extremely important factor, Beck said.

The MPC7448 will consume less than 10 watts of power running at around 1.4GHz, and just under 15 watts of power running at its top speed of 1.7GHz, Beck said. There is a direct relationship between clock speed and power consumption in chip design, but moving from an older manufacturing technology to a newer one generally allows chip makers to increase the speed of their chips while reducing power consumption. Newer manufacturing technologies allow chip makers to build smaller transistors, which are the key to making this happen.

Ten watts is an important threshold, because chips that consume more than ten watts generally need some type of external cooling, while chips that consume less than that do not always require a cooling fan. Fanless devices cost less and can be used in more demanding environments, Beck said.

But fanless devices are also quiet, making them well-suited for home multimedia applications such as set-top boxes, digital media hubs or gaming consoles, Beck said. Freescale hopes to capture design wins outside of its traditional strength in networking devices by emphasizing the MPC7448’s performance and power consumption, he said.

Performance was enhanced by increasing the chip’s top speed from 1.4GHz to 1.7GHz, and Freescale also doubled the amount of Level 2 cache on the chip from 512K bytes to 1M bytes. Cache memory stores frequently accessed data in a repository close to the CPU (central processing unit) where it can be accessed more quickly than data stored in a system’s memory.

The MPC7448 has been available to manufacturers in sample quantities since February, and Freescale plans to begin mass-producing the chip in October, Beck said. Pricing will vary depending on the quantity ordered, but a 10,000-unit order will cost just under $100 per chip, he said.