Titan

Titan is a family of 32-bit Power Architecture-based microprocessors designed by Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC).

It is designed to be the foundation of embedded processors and system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions. While being high performance, reaching speeds up to 2 GHz, it remains extremely power efficient, drawing just 2.5 W per core. Where there usually is a trade-off between performance and power, AMCC used the Fast14 technology from Intrinsity 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 SoC implementations consuming less than 15 W. There are plans for single, dual and quad-core versions.

The Titan has a new superscalar, out of order 8-9 stage core with a novel three-stage cache 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 is compliant with the Power ISA v.2.04.

Implementations

• APM 83290 - The first implementations of the Titan core design. Two 1.5 GHz cores with FPU, 512 kB shared L2 cache, DDR2 controller, security engine, multi channel DMA and I/O engine for Gbit Ethernet, PCIe, USB, RapidIO and/or SATA. It begun sampling in October 2009[1]. The processor is aimed at telecom and control plane applications. It is built using TSMC's 90 nm bulk CMOS fabrication to reduce cost.[2]

See also

• AMCC
• Power Architecture

External links

• AMCC's pressrelease
• AMCC Next Generation Power Architecture Processor - Titan – Power.org

• AMCC drives to high end of embedded PowerPC market – EETimes
• Intrinsity Nets 2 GHz, 4000 DMIPS PowerPC FastCore - Market Wire