The wind of multicore processor has blown for a while. Driven by smartphone, multicore
processor, featuring providing the maximum performance and flexibility, is increasing, from quad-core to even eight-core. It is expected revenue for multicore processors to grow much faster than the overall embedded market in the next coming years, from $550 million in 2012, according to
Linley Group.
As an inevitable trend in the future, general-purpose embedded processors are projected to recover to growth this year after maintaining roughly flat revenue of $3.8 billion in 2012. By 2017, revenue foresees $4.6 billion.
The following are the results given by Linley Group:
Intel, the largest supplier of embedded multicore processors with 46% of market share, may see shares decline due to the weak performance of traditional PC industry. Standard PC and server x86 processors are the main contributors. But due to the not ideal result in data plane, as well as the increasing integration requirements, Intel is attempting to use a customized south bridge known as Cave Creek to compete in these applications, but only see weak performance in the initial version.
Broadcom, with the help of mobile devices, became one of the less profit gainers in 2012. After acquisition of NetLogic, Broadcom got multicore shares in 2012. Linley Group believes Broadcom’s larger sales team and complementary Ethernet products will enhance sales of XLP processors, namely eight cores.
Cavium led the original multicore charge, delivering up to 16 CPUs in its first Octeon products. These processors established Cavium as the leader in the data plane, growing rapidly and more than doubling XLP revenue. The company focuses on the data plane, where a combination of many small CPUs and a wealth of hardware accelerators are ideal. In addition, Cavium is developing an multicore ARM chip for servers.
As the largest supplier of embedded processors for communications, Freescale has the advantage of incumbency at many OEMs, but disadvantage in multicore position. Despite late recognizing the multicore trend, the company is shipping competitive products, such as current-generation QorIQ P series. The company and LSI have announced embedded ARM processor.
LSI targets communications—primarily wireless base stations—with its new Axxia processors. They combine four PowerPC CPUs with autonomous data-plane hardware that offers unique capabilities and power efficiency for packet processing, compared with more-CPU-centric designs such as Octeon.
Tags：
multicore processor, embedded processor