Freescale begins sampling QorIQ T2080 processor

The T2080 features eight virtual cores and is designed for control plane or integrated control and data plane processing. Target applications include mobile backhaul equipment, LTE/WCDMA channel cards, network switching and routing, intelligent NIC and military and aerospace products. The device's dual threaded e6500 Power Architecture core is said to provide 1.7x the performance of a single threaded e6500 core. Freescale claims it delivers up to 1.8GHz of performance while maintaining a short, seven stage pipeline for optimal latency response to unpredictable control plane code branches. The e6500 core also features AltiVec technology with a 128bit single instruction multiple data vector processor, which performs calculations that dsps would otherwise handle, such as signal processing acceleration and radar processing, but at much lower power.