Applied Micro develops first ARMv8 64bit device on an FPGA

Ready for TSMC 40nm and 28nm process in 2012
By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Applied Micro has demonstrated the world’s first 64bit ARMv8 processor core running on an FPGA platform and parallels AppliedMicro’s launch of the industry’s first 64bit ARM 'Server-on-a-Chip' solution in a single footprint, designed to deliver disruptively low power and cost points for server and cloud computing applications.
“The demonstration marks a fundamental achievement by AppliedMicro’s engineering team to provide a proof of a single PMD core running both UBoot and 64bit Linux,” said Vinay Ravuri, Vice President of AppliedMicro’s Embedded and Processing Business Unit. “It also provides pre-silicon customer evaluation of our 64bit ARM solution and paves the way for a more sustainable future of cloud computing as we leverage this architecture to provide high-performance devices that consume less power and lower costs compared to today’s server chips.”
The demonstration platform consists of Xilinx Virtex-6 running a server SoC design with an ARM64 CPU complex, coherent CPU fabric, high performance I/O network, memory subsystem along with fully functional SoC subsystem.
Applied Micro’s 64bit processor family will use the large installed base of ARM software and hardware solutions and appeal to the open-source software community, similar to its 32bit predecessor. With tremendous interest shown by OEMs and ODMs in the cloud computing space, the platform is fully enabled with server class open-source Linux distributions. Additionally Applied Micro is working with a number of server-class and embedded Linux vendors. Full open-source compilers and tool chains will be provided by AppliedMicro and ARM ecosystem partners. Additionally, optimised compilers, tool chains, and debuggers will be provided by key strategic partners.
Full ecosystem support for the FPGA platform with performance metrics will be available for customer evaluation by the first half of 2012. A full suite of cloud computing applications driving various target workloads, such as Web, Memcached, Hadoop, Webserver, will also be available in that timeframe.

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