CriticalBlue Announces Optimized Prism Support for NetLogic Microsystems' Multi-core Processor Portfolio

SAN JOSE and SANTA CLARA, California, April 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

- Strong Customer Demand Drives Release of Prism Platform Support Packages for NetLogic Microsystems' XLP(R), XLR(R) and XLS(R) Multi-Core Processor Families

CriticalBlue, a pioneer in embedded multicore software analysis, exploration and verification tools, announced today the immediate availability of support for NetLogic Microsystems' industry-leading XLP(R), XLR(R), and XLS(R) multi-core processor families within its Prism product. Software developers can now analyze their existing software applications, quickly evaluate NetLogic Microsystems' best-in-class multi-core processors, and accelerate the selection and design using these multi-core processors.

This announcement broadens CriticalBlue's Prism capabilities with leading multi-core vendors such as NetLogic Microsystems. Further enhancements to the end user experience using NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processors will continue to be made available throughout the year.

NetLogic Microsystems' XLP processor family features the industry's first and only quad-issue, quad-threaded communications processor architecture in the advanced 40nm process with unparalleled processing performance and scalability up to 128 NXCPUs(TM). Each NXCPU operates at up to 2.0 GHz and is based on a best-in-class superscalar engine and out-of-order execution capabilities for converged data plane and control plane processing. The multi-core, multi-threaded processor offers a tri-level cache architecture with over 50 Mbytes of fully coherent on-chip cache which delivers 40 Terabits/sec of extremely high-speed on-chip memory bandwidth. The integrated high-speed Inter-chip Coherency Interface (ICI) offers full cache and memory coherency across the 128 NXCPUs, enabling software applications to seamlessly run in Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) or Asymmetric Multi Processing (AMP) modes. The unique combination of superior processor cores with scalability to 128 NXCPUs and over 160 programmable processing engines deliver over 160Gbps throughput and 240 million packets per second (Mpps) of intelligent application processing performance, making it the industry's highest performance multi-core communications processors for intelligent Layers 4-7 network, services and application processing.

"NetLogic Microsystems is a leading player in the multi-core silicon market and we have seen direct customer demand for support of their platforms inside Prism for projects targeting base stations, packet transport and packet core systems." said David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue. "The ongoing development program with NetLogic Microsystems will take today's released support and enhance it further so that Prism can even more accurately and completely represent the behavior of end users' software running on NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processors."

"Our XLP, XLR, and XLS multi-core processor families continue to lead the industry in performance, functionality and power profile," said Chris O'Reilly, vice president of marketing at NetLogic Microsystems. "Our collaboration with CriticalBlue enables our customers to use Prism and get a positive experience, as they migrate towards and adopt our multi-core platforms."

Prism is an award winning, EclipseTM-based embedded multi-core programming system which allows software engineers to realize the full potential of multi-core processors without significant changes to their existing development flow. Prism analyzes the behavior of code running on hardware development boards, virtual machines or simulators. It allows engineers to take their existing sequential or multithreaded code and, before making any changes, explore and analyze opportunities to introduce or add further concurrency. Having identified the optimal parallelization strategies in this way, developers code a parallel implementation, and then reuse Prism to verify performance efficiency and thread-safe operations.

In addition to partitioning software onto multicore hardware, results of this development program enable developers to use Prism to quantify the benefit of software migration onto NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processors. Developers can select the appropriate processor from the XLP, XLR and XLS families and analyze the impact of the built-in hardware threading, data cache misses, and instruction throughput on a thread, function or source line level, resulting in an ability to see the impact of such core architectural features on the overall concurrent schedule. This important feedback to the software programmer would be extremely difficult to visualize otherwise. Ultimately, Prism provides developers with an estimate of the performance gain achievable by partitioning their program into multiple threads while targeting one of NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processors, as well as providing a methodology and flow to implement, tune and verify that multi-threaded software.

The Core-level Platform Support Package (PSP) for Prism targeting XLP, XLR, and XLS multi-core processors is offered at a price of $400 (USD) per month with an annual subscription agreement. Download a 30-day evaluation copy of Prism for NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processor families at http://www.criticalblue.com/prism/netlogic.

Key Points:

- This announcement enables faster development and improved optimization of multicore software applications and hence accelerates time to market of end products based on NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processor families.

- Integration with Prism allows NetLogic Microsystems' customers to analyze their existing single threaded application code for use on multi-core processors and follow a simple migration path through implementation, performance tuning and verification.

- Prism technology is an Eclipse plug-in and is based on dynamic tracing of the users' software execution in a Linux target environment.

- Developers work in a familiar Eclipse environment with CriticalBlue's Prism development tools.

About CriticalBlue

CriticalBlue is a pioneer of flexible, automated system design solutions that meet the increasing performance, power, and cost demands associated with the delivery of advanced electronic products within today's demanding design schedules. The increasing use of complex, multicore processor architectures has accelerated demand for CriticalBlue's technology and expertise throughout all electronic industry sectors. Headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, with offices in San Jose, California, and Tokyo, Japan, the company has delivered multiple solutions for key aspects of embedded software design, including Prism, a multicore embedded software design environment, and Cascade, a software accelerator synthesis technology. The company is funded by European, US Silicon Valley, Japanese venture capitalists and corporate investors. To learn more, please visit http://www.criticalblue.com

About NetLogic Microsystems

NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NETL) is a worldwide leader in high-performance intelligent semiconductor solutions that are powering next-generation Internet networks. NetLogic Microsystems' best-in-class products perform highly differentiated tasks of accelerating complex network traffic to significantly enhance the performance and functionality of advanced 3G/4G mobile wireless infrastructure, data center, enterprise, metro Ethernet, edge and core infrastructure networks. NetLogic Microsystems' market-leading product portfolio includes high-performance multi-core processors, knowledge-based processors, content processors, network search engines, ultra low-power embedded processors and high-speed 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet PHY solutions. These products are designed into high-performance systems such as switches, routers, wireless base stations, security appliances, networked storage appliances, service gateways and connected media devices offered by leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). NetLogic Microsystems is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has offices and design centers throughout North America, Asia and Europe. For more information about products offered by NetLogic Microsystems, call +1-408-454-3000 or visit the NetLogic Microsystems Web site at http://www.netlogicmicro.com.

NetLogic Microsystems, the NetLogic Microsystems logo and Putting Intelligence in the Network, XLP, XLR, and XLS are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners. All product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE CriticalBlue