Motorola, Inc., 2001. All rights reserved.
PowerPC
Delivering Performance Enhancement in 60x Bus Mode
Susan Seale
G4 Architecture White Paper
Semiconductor Products Sector
You know the scenario: you’ve just released the
greatest whiz-bang product to the networking
marketplace—fantastic
performance, and the right price. But right away,
you have to watch out for competitors approaching
from all sides. To maintain your leadership
position in the market, your mission—should you
choose to accept it—is to upgrade your product’s
performance (and of course lower its cost) with
minimal hardware and software redesign. Where
do you begin
If your system is PowerPC-based, using the
MPC750 (G3) in particular, there are a variety of
options to consider. Some devices offer new
features. This makes the marketers happy. Most
new offerings deliver higher core frequency. Now
the software developers are happy. And many
PowerPC upgrades are drop-in replacements
because they have the same footprint as the device
you’re using today. Even the hardware team can
celebrate. Naturally, the right choice depends on
how in your current implementation your software
pushes the processor to its limits.
At this point in the analysis, most embedded
developers admit to one common bottleneck in the
processor subsystem: I/O bandwidth. No matter
how high you crank up the processor speed, how
big the on-chip caches are, or how fast the core can
execute an instruction, the limitation of your
system’s performance is dependent upon how
much data the processor can move in and out (with
signi
fi
cant manipulation in between).
features,
excellent
Performance Enhancement
This paper highlights ways that the PowerPC
MPC74xx (G4) series can improve the I/O
bandwidth of your G3 system with minimal
engineering effort and can help you overcome the
barrier to best-in-class system performance.
Even without discussing the bene
fi
ts of the
AltiVec processing unit available in G4
processors (let’s leave that exercise for an analysis
of SIMD-intensive applications.) or enhancements
offered by G4’s MPX bus mode option, there are
many reasons for choosing a G4-series processor
for your system. For now, let’s consider only those
bene
fi
ts which apply to PowerPC systems using
the conventional PowerPC instruction set and the
standard 60x bus mode.
May we introduce the MPC7400/7410 and the
MPC7440/7450 devices.
Benefit 1. Higher Sustainable System
Bus Bandwidth
‘Peak bandwidth,’ the maximum number of bytes
that can be transferred in a single cycle, is a purely
theoretical number. By contrast, ‘maximum
bandwidth,’ the maximum number of bytes that
can be transferred over several transactions,
provides a value which takes into account the
memory system latency and the limitations
associated with the bus protocol, in this case the
60x bus. For example, the 60x bus requires one
dead cycle between address tenures and one dead
cycle between data tenures. In a real system, I/O
bandwidth is further limited by particular device
implementation constraints. (Refer to Bene
fi
t 2
below for more detail on one of the architectural
constraints of the MPC750—the inability to
pipeline cache loads.) ‘Sustainable bandwidth’
means the maximum number of bytes that can be
transferred over an extended number of cycles,
taking into account all of the constraints mentioned
above.
F
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.
For More Information On This Product,
Go to: www.freescale.com
n
.