The XScale, a microprocessor core, is Intel's implementation of the 5th generation of the ARM architecture, and consists of several distinct families: IXP, IXC, IOP and PXA (see more below). The PXA family was sold to Marvell Technology Group in June 2006. CPU redirects here. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... The current version of the article or section reads more like an advertisement than an encyclopedic article. ... Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is an American producer of storage, communications and consumer semiconductor products. ...

The XScale architecture is based on the ARM v5TE ISA without the floating point instructions. XScale uses a 7 stage integer and an 8 stage memory Superpipelined RISC architecture. It is the successor to the Intel StrongARM line of microprocessors and microcontrollers, which Intel acquired from DEC's Digital Semiconductor division as the side-effect of a lawsuit between the two companies. Intel used the StrongARM to replace their ailing line of outdated RISC processors, the i860 and i960. An instruction set, or instruction set architecture (ISA), describes the aspects of a computer architecture visible to a programmer, including the native datatypes, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O (if any). ... A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ... An instruction pipeline is a technique used in the design of microprocessors and other digital electronic devices to increase their performance. ... Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ... Systems Architecture. ... DEC StrongARM SA-110 Microprocessor The StrongARM microprocessor is a faster version of the Advanced RISC Machines ARM design. ... A microprocessor (sometimes abbreviated µP) is a digital electronic component with transistors on a single semiconductor integrated circuit (IC). ... The integrated circuit from an Intel 8742, a 8-bit microcontroller that includes a CPU running at 12 MHz, 128 bytes of RAM, 2048 byte of EPROM, and I/O in the same chip. ... Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... The Intel i860 (also 80860, and code named N10) was a RISC microprocessor from Intel, first released in 1989. ... Intels i960 (or 80960) was a RISC-based microprocessor design that became popular during the early 1990s as an embedded microcontroller, becoming a best-selling CPU in that field, along with the competing AMD 29000. ...

All the generations of XScale are 32-bit ARM v5TE processors manufactured with a 0.18 µm process and have a 32 KiB data cache and a 32 KiB instruction cache (this would be called a 64 KiB Level 1 cache on other processors). They also all have a 2 KiB mini-data cache. Look up cache in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Processor families

The XSCALE core is used in a number of microcontroller families manufactured by Intel, notably: The integrated circuit from an Intel 8742, a 8-bit microcontroller that includes a CPU running at 12 MHz, 128 bytes of RAM, 2048 byte of EPROM, and I/O in the same chip. ...

• Application Processors (with the prefix PXA). There are three generations of XScale Application Processors, described below: PXA210/PXA25x, PXA26x and PXA27x.
• I/O Processors (with the prefix IOP)
• Network Processors (with the prefix IXP)
• Control Plane Processors (with the prefix IXC).

There are also standalone processors: the 80200 and 80219 (targeted primarily at PCI applications). For other meanings of PCI, see PCI (disambiguation). ...

PXA

PXA210/PXA25x

The PXA210 was Intel's entry level XScale targeted at mobile phone applications. It was released with the PXA250 in February 2002 and comes clocked at 133 MHz and 200 MHz.

The PXA25x family consists of the PXA250 and PXA255. The PXA250 was Intel's first generation of XScale processors. There was a choice of three clock speeds: 200 MHz, 300 MHz and 400 MHz. It came out in February 2002. In March 2003, the revision C0 of the PXA250 was renamed to PXA255. The main differences were a doubled bus speed (100 MHz to 200 MHz) for faster data transfer, lower voltage (only 1.3 V at 400 MHz) for lower power consumption and writeback functionality for the data cache, the lack of which had severely impaired performance on the PXA250. In synchronous digital electronics, such as most computers, a clock signal is a signal used to coordinate the actions of two or more circuits. ... A megahertz (MHz) is one million (106) hertz, a measure of frequency. ...

PXA26x

The PXA26x family consists of the PXA260 and PXA261-PXA263. The PXA260 is a stand-alone processor clocked at the same as the PXA25x, but features a TPBGA package which is about 53% smaller than the PXA25x's PBGA package. The PXA261-PXA263 are the same as the PXA260 but have Intel StrataFlash memory stacked on top of the processor in the same package; 16 MiB of 16-bit memory in the PXA261, 32 MiB of 16-bit memory in the PXA262 and 32 MiB of 32-bit memory in the PXA263. The PXA26x family was released in March 2003.

PXA27x

The PXA27x family (code-named Bulverde) consists of the PXA270 and PXA271-PXA272 processors. This revision is a huge update to the XScale family of processors. The PXA270 is clocked in four different speeds: 312 MHz, 416 MHz, 520 MHz and 624 MHz and is a stand-alone processor with no packaged memory. The PXA271 can be clocked to 312 MHz or 416 MHz and has 32 MiB of 16-bit stacked StrataFlash memory and 32 MiB of 16-bit SDRAM in the same package. The PXA272 can be clocked to 312 MHz, 416 MHz or 520 MHz and has 64 MiB of 32-bit stacked StrataFlash memory.

Intel also added many new technologies to the PXA27x family such as:

• Wireless SpeedStep: the operating system can clock the processor down based on load to save power.
• Wireless MMX: 43 new SIMD instructions containing the full MMX instruction set and the integer instructions from Intel's SSE instruction set along with some instructions unique to the XScale. Wireless MMX provides 16 extra 64-bit registers that can be treated as an array of two 32-bit words, four 16-bit halfwords or eight 8-bit bytes. The XScale core can then perform up to eight adds or four MACs in parallel in a single cycle. This capability is used to boost speed in decoding and encoding of multimedia and in playing games.
• Additional peripherals, such as an USB-Host interface and a camera interface.
• Internal 256 KiB SRAM to reduce power consumption and latency.

The PXA27x family was released in April 2004. Along with the PXA27x family Intel released the 2700G embedded graphics co-processor. SpeedStepâ„¢ is a series of technologies (including SpeedStep, SpeedStep II, and SpeedStep III) built into some Intel processors. ... MMX is a SIMD instruction set designed by Intel, introduced in 1997 in their Pentium MMX microprocessors. ... -1... An instruction set, or instruction set architecture (ISA), describes the aspects of a computer architecture visible to a programmer, including the native datatypes, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O (if any). ... SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) is a SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instruction set designed by Intel, and introduced in 1999 in their Pentium III series processors as a reply to AMDs 3DNow! (which had debuted a year earlier). ... Register or registration may mean: Registration (or licensing) is required of a number of occupations and professions where maintenance of standards is required to protect public safety. ... In computing, word is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular computer design. ... A byte is commonly used as a unit of storage measurement in computers, regardless of the type of data being stored. ... The multiply-accumulate operation computes a product and adds it to an accumulator. ... For other senses of the word code, see code (disambiguation). ... The word encoding has a number of meanings. ... For an account of the words periphery and peripheral as they are used in biology, sociology, politics, computer hardware, and other fields, see the periphery disambiguation page. ... A six-transistor CMOS SRAM cell. ... Intel 2700G (Marathon) is a low power (50mW max) graphics co-processor for the XScale PXA27x processor and is built on PowerVR MBX technology. ... A co-processor is a secondary processor in a computer that handles tasks that the general-purpose CPU either cannot implement, or does not implement for efficiency reasons. ...

PXA29x Monahans

Toradex Colibri XScale Monahans PXA29X SODIMM-module

In August 2005 Intel announced the successor to Bulverde, codenamed Monahans. They demoed it showing its capability to play back high definition encoded video on a PDA screen. The new processor was shown clocked at 1.25 GHz but Intel said it only offered a 25% increase in performance (800 MIPS for the 624 MHz PXA270 processor vs 1000 MIPS for 1.25 GHz Monahans). An announced successor to the 2700G graphics processor, code named Stanwood, has since been cancelled. Some of the features of Stanwood are integrated into Monahans. For extra graphics capabilities, Intel recommends third party chips like the Nvidia GoForce chip family. Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (940x614, 143 KB) Image made by Toradex (www. ... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (940x614, 143 KB) Image made by Toradex (www. ... Million instructions per second (MIPS) is a measure of a computers processor speed. ... NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) is a major supplier of graphics processors (graphics processing units, GPUs), graphics cards, and media and communications devices for PCs and game consoles such as the original Xbox and the upcoming PlayStation 3. ... The NVIDIA GoForce line of graphics processing unit (GPU) used mainly in smaller electronic devices such as the Gizmondo and PDA. Examples of the GoForce GPU include: GoForce2150 GoForce3000 GoForce4000 GoForce4500 GoForce4800 GoForce5500 The GoForce 5500 is a multimedia processor; not simply a graphics processor. ...

IXC

IXC1100

The IXC1100 processor features clock speeds at 266, 400, and 533 MHz, a 133 MHz bus, 32 KiB of instruction cache, 32 KiB of data cache, and 2 KiB of mini-data cache. It is also designed for low power consumption, using 2.4 W at 533 MHz. The chip comes in the 35 mm PBGA package.

IOP

The IOP line of processors is designed to allow computers and storage devices to transfer data and increase performance by offloading I/O functionality from the main CPU of the device. The IOP3XX processors are based on the XScale architecture and designed to replace the older 80219 processor and i960 family of chips. There are ten different IOP processors currently available: IOP303, IOP310, IOP315, IOP321, IOP331, IOP332, IOP333, IOP341, IOP342 and IOP348. Clock speeds range from 100 MHz to 1.2 GHz. The processors also differ in PCI bus type, PCI bus speed, memory type, maximum memory allowable, and the number of processor cores.

IXP network processor

The XScale core is utilized in Intel's IXP network processor line. The IXP network processor family ranges from solutions aimed at small/medium office network applications , IXP4XX, to high performance network processors such as the IXP2850, capable of sustaining up to OC-192 line rates. In IXP4XX devices the XScale core is used as both a control and data plane processor, providing both system control and data processing. The task of the XScale in the IXP12XX and IXP2XXX devices is typically to provide control plane functionality only, with data processing performed by the microengines, examples of such control plane tasks include routing table updates, microengine control, memory management. OC-192 (Optical Carrier 192) is a fiber optic network line with a SONET rate of 9953. ...

Applications

XScale microprocessors can be found in products such as the popular RIM BlackBerry handheld, the Dell Axim family of Pocket PCs, most of the Zire, Treo and Tungsten Handheld lines by Palm, later versions of the Sharp Zaurus, the Motorola A780, the Acer n50, the Compaq iPaq 3900 series and many other PDAs. It is used as the main CPU in the Iyonix desktop computer running RISC OS, and the NSLU2 (Slug) running a form of Linux. The XScale is also used in devices such as PVPs (Portable Video Players), PMCs (Portable Media Centres), including the Creative Zen Portable Media Player, and industrial embedded systems. Apple's recent strategic partnership with Intel has fueled rumors that XScale processors will be found in future iPod products. Look up rim in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The BlackBerry is a wireless handheld device introduced in 1999 which supports push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing and other wireless information services. ... This articles section called Criticisms and concerns does not cite its references or sources. ... A Pocket PC is a computer in a handheld size that runs a variation of the operating system Windows CE. It has many capabilities of modern desktop PCs. ... The Palm Zire series of PDAs is Palms consumer line. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Palm Tungsten T5 The Tungsten series was Palm, Inc. ... palmOnes Logo palmOne, Inc. ... Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 running OpenZaurus and OPIE, with docking cradle and stylus The Sharp Zaurus is the name of a series of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) made by Sharp Corporation. ... The Motorola A780 is mobile phone and PDA running the Linux operating system sold in Europe and Asia. ... iPAQ presently refers to a Pocket PC and personal digital assistant first unveiled by Compaq in April 2000; the name was borrowed from Compaqs earlier iPAQ Desktop Personal Computers. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section can be improved by converting lengthy lists to text. ... CPU redirects here. ... The Iyonix PC is an Acorn-clone personal computer from Castle Technology Ltd. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The NSLU2 The NSLU2 is a device made by Linksys for making USB Flash memory or hard disk devices accessible over a network (NAS). ... Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ... The Creative Zen is a line of digital audio players produced by Creative Technology and a branch off the earlier Creative NOMAD brand (the other branch being the MuVo series). ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... A grayscale fourth-generation iPod with earphones. ...

At the other end of the market, the XScale IOP33x Storage I/O processors are used in some Intel Xeon-based server platforms. The Xeon is Intels current generation of server-class microprocessors for PCs. ...

Sale of business

On June 27, 2006, the sale of Intel's XScale assets was announced. Intel agreed to sell the XScale business to Marvell Technology Group for an estimated $600 million in cash and the assumption of unspecified liabilities. The move is intended to permit Intel to focus its resources on its core x86 and server businesses. Both parties advised they expect to close the transaction within five months, at which time Intel will continue manufacturing Xscale processors until Marvell secures other manufacturing facilities. Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is an American producer of storage, communications and consumer semiconductor products. ...

See also

• RedBoot open source bootloader, the standard boot firmware shipped with XScale boards

RedBoot is an open source application that uses the eCos real-time operating system Hardware Abstraction Layer to provide bootstrap firmware for embedded systems. ...

External links

• Intel XScale Technology Overview
• Intel StrataFlash Memory
• Publicly Available Devices Based on Intel XScale® Technology
• Marvell buys Intel's handheld processor unit for $600 million