Intel Exploits a Chink in Freescale PowerPC's Armor in the Mil/Aero Market

Intel’s newest processor family introduced for embedded applications, the Core family, is aimed at combining energy efficiency with advanced features and performance. The Core processors are built on 32nm technology, which provides very low power consumption of 18W to 35W for the level of performance provided from this family of processors. Released in early January, versions of the Core i5 and i7 featuring an extended life cycle of 7 years were immediately announced for the embedded market and a flood of product announcements featuring Core i5 and Core i7 from embedded board vendors accompanied on the very same day.

Intel is using the Core i5 and i7 processors to target a number of different embedded segments and applications, but we believe the most important and potential game changer, is the Core family’s ability to target embedded military/aerospace applications. The mil/aero segment has traditionally been the domain of the Power architecture, and although the Intel x86 architecture has made modest inroads into mil/aero in the past five years, PowerPC has continued to dominate the segment because of its low power consumption and its superior ability to process floating point arithmetic. The PowerPC processors with Altivec in particular gave PowerPC a stranglehold on the aerospace and defense signal processing market over the past 10 years, as digital signal processing applications are those that benefit most from floating point operations. VDC’s latest Embedded Military COTS report released in November 2009 showed that PowerPC was used on 77% of the VME Single Board Computers (SBCs) shipped to Mil/Aero customers in North America compared to a 21% share for all Intel x86 architectures.

However, the Core family features a vector processing technology generically known as SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions), a 128-bit wide processing unit, capable of simultaneously operating on four single-precision (32-bit) floating-point values. This is similar performance to what was previously provided by Altivec, however, SSE also features support for double-precision (64-bit) floating point, a feature that was not available in AltiVec. In addition, each Core i7 processor has its own SSE unit, so the raw floating-point performance scales with the number of cores.

The addition of floating point performance to this family of Intel processors in combination with low power consumption puts the Intel x86 architecture on course for a head-on-collision with PowerPC processors in military and aerospace applications. Add to this an uncertain fate for Altivec, as the latest high performance processor from Freesclae, the eight-core QorIQ P4080, does not include an Altivec unit. Instead, the P4080 features the standard Floating Point Unit (FPU), which is not the vector processor type required to attain the floating-point performance required for signal processing applications. And finally, the sheer quantity of development tools available for x86 and the massive armies of experienced developers familiar with x86 are equally hard for mil/aero customers to resist as they are for customers in other embedded segments. And it appears there is an opening for Intel x86 to become the dominate processor architecture for the military/aerospace segment. This is one of the few embedded segments where x86 does not already dominate and one of PowerPC’s two remaining strongholds, along with Communications Infrastructure.

Proof of the excitement for Intel Core i5 and i7 in the mil/aero segment are the multitude of VME and VPX SBCs already released by the leading embedded board suppliers including Curtiss-Wright Controls, Emerson Network Power, Extreme Engineering, GE Intelligent Platforms, and Kontron.

Intel’s future in mil/aero applications and embedded in general appears to have just gotten brighter, while PowerPC’s future in mil/aero may have just faded if Freescale doesn’t address the absence of Altivec in its latest processors.