I’m attending the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando, Florida this week representing MontaVista. This is Freescale’s 4th FTF event in the US and like every year it has been a valuable technical training event and a chance to connect with the experts on various technologies.

Multicore and the QorIQ P4080

The big Freescale announcement this week, in my opinion, was the new multicore QorIQ P4080 that was unveiled. It is an e500 core based design with 8 cores on chip. What is compelling about the annoucement at FTF is that the chip itself is not present. Each and every instance you see of a demo built upon the P4080 is running in a simulator. Freescale has provided key partners (MV included) with the simulator and everyone has started to pre-integrate their products with the P4080 platform.

Virtutech Simics

The simulator used by Freescale is Virtutech’s Simics. This is not a typical cycle-accurate simulator that is used to support semiconductor design and prototype. The simulation is based on functional (ie. behavioural) aspects of the design so the simulation runs quickly. Rather than taking days to boot Linux like the behavioral simulators might for complicated chip designs simulated at the RTL level this one is actually quite quick. I’ve worked with Simics fairly extensively (though I’m still learning) when building our MontaVista Test Drive evaluation system. We’ve run Linux and applications unmodified on Simics… it just works. For those who need cycle accurate timing for performance benchmarking please give Virtutech a call… they may have something to say on that.

Everyone in on the P4080

So what’s running on this not-yet-a-chip chip? Just about everything and most of it seems to be Linux. We’ve got MontaVista Linux running on the platform now:

If you run over to the Virtutech booth you can see just about every other OS that might be running doing so at the same time:

Simics is really aimed not at just running a single hardware instance but in simulating the entire system (with custom I/O) and system-of-systems that interoperate.

The Technology Lab

Freescale has one or two times a day an open “Technology Lab” where everyone gets to mill around and see what’s new. What FTF does right is a) they make sure some “fun” technology shows up and b) they serve beer and food. Hard to complain about that. What’s fun this year:

A robot that autonomously plays air hockey. The robot uses a video camera mounted above the air hockey table to sense the puck. Notice the reflective tape outlining the puck. The robot is fast and quite good. It is not invincible, however… folks who are fast enough seem to be able to beat it at the corners. You can see it playing a little on a webcam covering the floor. The system was designed by Nuvation for Freescale’s use a demo, I think.

This is a Linux based HD digital media server shown with some great HD road rally scenes. Thanks to Greg Shippen (System Architect, Freescale) for showing it to me. It was streaming simply beautiful HD video without and challenges.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under semiconductor.