NetLogic Unveils Alchemy Processors, HyperNAS Solution at CES

Semiconductor solutions company NetLogic Microsystems announced it will be demonstrating more than two dozen customer systems using its low-power Alchemy processors at this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, as well as its HyperNAS reference solution, a network-attached storage reference system targeted at enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and the digital home.

The Alchemy demonstrations target a variety of embedded applications such as automotive in-vehicle infotainment, telematics, audio/video navigation, enterprise thin clients and other media-rich applications; the processors run at 800MHz, and integrate a high-definition video acceleration engine and a 2D/3D graphics processor in a 537-pin BGA package with 0.65mm or 0.8mm ball pitches. Alchemy processors also include an LCD controller with four graphics planes for 32-bit aRGB support, and the Media Acceleration Engine (MAE) provides H.264, MPEG 1/2/4, DivX, XviD, WMV9 and VC-1 hardware acceleration.

"We are very excited to see the continued strong design win momentum of our industry-leading Alchemy processor family," said Behrooz Abdi, executive vice president at NetLogic Microsystems. "We have successfully differentiated ourselves from the competition because of the powerful processing performance, robust connected media acceleration and the ultra low-power functionality that our market-leading Alchemy processors offer."

The HyperNAS reference solution offers "office-in-the-box" functionality with secure wireless routing, CIFS and NFS protocol based network file sharing and printing, high-definition (HD) video streaming, voice-over-IP (VOIP) communications and conferencing server, file backup and remote replication server. In addition, the reference solution supports Universal Plug-and-Play (uPnP), DLNA, DHCP, FTP, e-mail, MySQL, Syslog and iSCSI Target RAID 0/1/10/5 feature capabilities. The reference solution also includes interface options including Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, PCI-Express and USB2.0, for connectivity to a multitude of client devices.

The HyperNAS reference solution uses NetLogic's family of XLS multicore processors, which offers processing performance of 1.5GHz, scalability from one to 16 vCPUs, and an integrated security engine.  The architecture of the XLS processor family enables the concurrent processing of multiple applications and functionality such as network attached storage, unified threat management (UTM) security, HD video streaming, VOIP, file sharing, network surveillance and archiving at a sustainable performance while consuming low CPU utilization. The company said this enables customers to develop and offer differentiated and scalable NAS solutions with the addition of multiple market-specific functions on a single XLS platform architecture.

"We are pleased to be announcing the availability of our HyperNAS reference solution that offers the superior performance of our innovative XLS processors," said Dilip Ramachandran, senior director of marketing for multicore processors at NetLogic Microsystems. "The reference solution delivers unmatched scalability and performance for next-generation NAS solutions for enterprise, SMB and digital home entertainment applications, thereby dramatically reducing time-to-market for our customers."