The Motorola Inc High Performance Embedded Systems Division duly announced the MPC821 PowerPC-derived microprocessor and it turns out to be a hot property, with communications and other functions integrated with the PowerPC core. It is designed for minimum power consumption in battery-powered portable electronic devices and Personal Digital Assistants. The MPC821 is designed to execute compute-intensive applications such as wireline and wireless modem data pumps, speech recognition, handwriting recognition and imaging, and combines an embedded PowerPC core with a Communication Processor Module that supports embedded signal processing, a colour or monochrome liquid crystal diode display controller, PCMCIA master controller, and flexible memory interface unit for both memory and system control. It also features the highest level of programmable on-chip peripherals to lower overall system cost and power consumption. It has integrated 4Kb instruction and 4Kb data caches and is claimed to deliver 33 MIPS at 25MHz and 53 MIPS at 40MHz off a 3.3V supply on the Dhrystone 2.1 benchmark. The Communication Module supports six serial communications channels; the embedded signal processor can sustain a rate of one 16 by 16 multiply and accumulate every clock cycle. The memory interface supports connection to traditional 68000 Big Endian systems, iAPX-86 Little Endian systems and PowerPC Little-Endian systems to facilitate file transfer. The MPC821 is in limited sampling with general sampling next month and volume expected by January; the 25MHz version will be available for a very competitive $70 in 10,000-up quantities. Supporters for the new chip include Wind River Systems Inc with its VxWorks real-time operating system and WindPower Tools for embedded application development, and Microware Systems Inc, which jumped the gun and trumpeted its support 10 days before the chip was launched. The only major question raised by the new chip is how easily it sits alongside the 68328 DragonBall processor adopted by Samsung Electronics Co for a Personal Digital Assistant, which is pitched at exactly the same market.
