Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12184 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> minator does appear to say Titan has been killed and that it
> will reappear later. He seems confused.
Thanks. I'm glad it's not me missing something obvious. Yet I'd like to know what he really meant. I think he can't seriously contradict himself in such an obvious way that it's almost frightening ;-)
> If your follow Applied Micro's press releases, you would be under the impression
> that Titan's low power draw 90nm construction was a result of AMCC's licensing of
> Intrinsity's Fast14 Technology.
Yes, that's the impression I've been under.
> Intrinsity's own press releases lay claim to far more responsibility in the design.
Indeed. There appears to be some kind of coherency gap between the two press releases.
> it has already been announced as part of an SOC to be produced this year
According to Applied Micro's October 2009 press release the APM83290 has been supposed to enter production in Q1 2010. This means that this SoC should now have been in production for at least 4.5 months already. So far I haven't spotted any statement regarding production delay let alone any existing device using this SoC. With each day passing without any new information minator's assessment becomes more and more probable, I fear.
> Too much has been speculated based on limited information coming from sources
> that, primarily, appear to want to emphasize their role in developing the product.
Without new information from either Intrinsity (unlikely because of having been bought by Apple) or Applied Micro there's not much more we can do except to speculate ;-)
> Their claim that "No other 32-bit PowerPC core even comes close to the
> 2.0 GHz 4000-plus DMIPS performance of this core" seems questionable
> in light of the MIPS figures you've posted.
Yes, depends on the definition of 'close' I guess. At 1.7 GHz (maximum clock rate as specified by Freescale) the e600 delivers 3910 DMIPS. It seems that about 2% less performance doesn't qualify as being 'close' ;-)
> The comparisons to AMCC's PPC460 core may turn out to be valid.
As I pointed out, Lauterbach lists the Titan core based APM83290 as being "PowerPC 450". On the other hand, they list both the PPC460EX and PPC460GT as being "PowerPC 460", ignoring the fact that these two SoCs actually have a PPC440 core. So maybe Titan was developed from the PPC460 core even, and Lauterbach got that wrong as well. Should the APM83290 really be based on an upclocked PPC460 core then there's the question what the
APM821xx (which should have been in production for at least 1.5 months according to the announcement press release, but is only really sampling for now) was needed for in comparison.