Freescale adds floating point arithmetic to its QorIQ Qonverge B4 family

Freescale Semiconductor has added advanced floating point technology to its QorIQ Qonverge B4 product family. Freescale says its advanced floating point technology is engineered to exceed the stringent requirements of computation-intensive applications that require high-precision numerical accuracy, such as radar, medical and media imaging, MAC-scheduler processing in Cloud-RAN, video analytics, security, industrial automation, and test and measurement systems. “Freescale’s breakthrough QorIQ Qonverge portfolio has experienced strong market acceptance and broad adoption throughout the communications and networking equipment space,” said Tareq Bustami, vice president of product management for Freescale’s Digital Networking business. “By adding advanced floating point arithmetic to support compute-intensive tasks, we are enabling a broader customer base to spark innovation with products leveraging the power, performance and cost advantages of QorIQ Qonverge technology.” Freescale added floating point support to the production version of the B4860 and B4420 SoCs while retaining binary code compatibility with the existing SC3900 core. This enables continuity for customers already developing software for these SoCs. Freescale explains: Different from many other heterogeneous multicore architectures, the B4 family provides a full cache-coherent system keeping data consis...