A wire-speed powerTM processor: 2.3GHz 45nm SOI with 16 cores and 64 threads

An emerging data-center market merges network and server attributes into a single wire-speed processor SoC. These processors are not network endpoints that consume data, but inline processors that filter or modify data and send it on. Wire-speed processors merge attributes from 1) network processors: many threaded low power cores, accelerators, integrated network and memory I/O, smaller memory line sizes and low total power, and from 2) server processors: full ISA cores, standard programming models, OS and hypervisor support, full virtualization and server RAS & infrastructure. Typical applications are edge-of-network processing, intelligent I/O devices in servers, network attached appliances, distributed computing, and streaming applications.