Today, TI introduced the innovative KeyStone™-based AM5K2Ex family of processors designed for industrial, avionics and more. These processors have the ability to compute a large amount of data quickly, while using less power, lasting longer and more reliable in harsh environments than similar processors in their class, a necessity in factories and planes.
“You get a ton of performance for a power efficient device, which is something you just don’t see in these types of applications,” said TI product marketing engineer Ellen Blinka.
Traditionally, the processing power needed to handle lots of computations in a very short amount of time required multiple chips, but the AM5K2Ex processors have essentially consolidated multiple chips into a single “multicore” chip (processors that contain more than one of the central processing components of the chip), saving computing time, power and space on the circuit board. The computations also run faster because these processors have more on-chip memory than competing devices, which can be accessed faster than off-chip memory.
The power savings comes from our own KeyStone architecture, a true innovation for multicore processors. The KeyStone platform is the backbone of the entire chip, enabling communication between processing elements on the chip. Through the advancements created by TI engineers, this backbone is one of the reasons why the processor is more power efficient.
“KeyStone-based processors have the ability to turn off different subsystems within the chip. For example, our chip has a security accelerator on it that can to do encryption and decryption, but if you don’t need the security feature, you can turn it off and save power that way,” Ellen said. “If you only need two of the cores running, you can shut down the two other cores and bring them back up when you have more work to do.”
Ellen also said what separates these chips from anything else in its class is its reliability. They can run powered-up for 100,000 hours and not fail, which makes these chips particularly interesting to those in the industrial and avionics fields. As an example, you likely won’t have your computer for more than a few years, so the processors in them don’t need to have as long of a life span as a piece of equipment in a factory or the flight controls in an airplane cockpit. But the AM5K2Ex processors can deliver the same performance found in other processors with a longer lifespan.
There’s another advantage too – the processor can survive extreme temperatures from -40 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius.
“If your equipment is going to experience wild temperature swings like an aircraft that might be really hot in the desert before takeoff, but then the airplane flies at 30,000 feet where it will be very cold, this chip can withstand that temperature variation,” Ellen said. “Going up to 100 degrees Celsius is important for factory automation because they don’t want to put fans in the equipment. As a result, they can’t cool chips down like a fan would in a laptop computer, so it must be able to withstand the high temperature.”
More processing performance, faster, lower power consumption and more reliable at extreme temperatures – it’s just one of the ways we’re making technology our customers can’t live without.