Sunnyvale, Calif. — Applied Micro Circuits Corp. has introduced energy-efficient versions of the company’s families of 405 and 460 microprocessors that consume up to 40 percent less power for a variety of embedded applications. The Power Architecture 405EX, 405EXr, 460EX, 460EXr and 460GT processors have been optimized for low-power consumption, with sacrificing performance, said the company.
Enabling system designers to cut system energy requirements, the new low-power processors offer up to 40 percent lower worst case power consumption and an improvement of about 20 percent in typical power consumption. For example, the Power Architecture 405EXr, which is used in wireless LAN access points as well as NAS storage systems and media gateways, now offers a maximum worst case active power consumption of just over 2 watts, a reduction of almost 1.5 watts, or 40 percent, said AppliedMicro.
The company said all current AppliedMicro customers using 405EX/EXr and 460EX/EXr/GT products will be migrated to the new low-power variants. These processors are said to offer identical functionality and performance with the advantage of low-power consumption.
AppliedMicro’s Power Architecture 405EX and 405EXr processors are designed into 802.11 wireless access points, WiMAX base stations and general networking and embedded systems. The 405EX offers core frequencies up to 600 MHz along with a variety of industry-standard interfaces including DDR2 SDRAM, two gigabit Ethernet, and two PCI-Express interfaces.
The Power Architecture 460EX/EXr/GT processors are designed for enterprise and carrier-class switching and routing equipment, multi-function printers and industrial applications. The 460-based devices offer speeds up to 1.2 GHz, a 256KB L2 cache, and an integrated floating-point unit. The 460EX/GT offers up to four gigabit Ethernet interfaces, two PCI-Express interfaces, legacy PCI support, two USB 2.0 interfaces, a SATA controller, hardware-RAID acceleration and Kasumi encryption/decryption.
Both the 405EX/EXr and the 460 devices have a hardware-based crypto-engine for data security acceleration.
The low-power versions of the Power Architecture 405EX, 405EXr, 460EX, 460EXr, and 460GT products are available in production quantities.
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