NetLogic (News - Alert) Microsystems, Inc., a major player in high-performance intelligent semiconductor solutions for next-generation Internet networks, has introduced the XLP Multi-Core Processor (News - Alert) Development Kit.

The kit includes comprehensive hardware and software tools, libraries, drivers and reference solutions to help accelerate time-to-market and reduce development effort for Tier One original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who are developing next-generation systems using the industry-leading XLP multi-core, multi-threaded network processors.

Officials with NetLogic claimed that Microsystems' best-in-class XLP network processor family is the first and only embedded communications processor that features quad-issue, quad-threaded and superscalar out-of-order capabilities with up to 128 NXCPUs operating at 2.0GHz.

The XLP multi-core network processor was recently rated "an exceptional CPU" which delivers "two to four times the performance of competing CPUs" by the Microprocessor Report.

Company officials said that NetLogic Microsystems' (News - Alert) production-ready XLP Multi-Core Processor Development Kit integrates everything needed to create and deploy control- and data-plane applications for product developers to quickly and easily design, test and debug next-generation network infrastructure systems, while leveraging the superior and highly differentiated features and compute power of the XLP multi-core network processors.

According to company officials, using the XLP Multi-Core Development Kit unleashes the massive performance and throughput benefits of NetLogic Microsystems' XLP network processors, and helps customers enhance product differentiation, reduce time-to-market and lower development risks.

"We are pleased to deliver a comprehensive hardware and software development kit that allows our customers to quickly go to market with our breakthrough XLP multi-core processor," said Chris O'Reilly, vice president of marketing at NetLogic Microsystems, in a statement.

O'Reilly said that the combination of the industry's most advanced and highly differentiated multi-core network processor along with a turnkey development kit gives the company a strong leadership position in high-end multi-core communications processing well ahead of the competition.

Company officials said that the XLP multi-core, multi-threaded network processor family integrates up to 128 NXCPUs that operate at up to 2.0 GHz and are based on a highly innovative superscalar engine with out-of-order execution capabilities to deliver unparalleled data plane and control plane performance, as well as the ability to support billions of in-flight messages and packet descriptors.

The XLP cores are quad-threaded to effectively minimize bottlenecks and memory latencies that are inherent in network data plane processing applications. Furthermore, the 128 NXCPUs are equipped with a tri-level cache architecture with over 50 Mbytes of fully coherent on-chip cache which delivers 160 Terabits/sec of extremely high-speed on-chip memory bandwidth.

The XLP processor also includes over 160 fully-autonomous programmable processing engines that provide independent and complete offload of additional network functions, including IPSec/SSL security encryption/decryption/authentication, packet parsing, packet queuing, packet management, compression/decompression, packet ordering, storage de-duplication, RAID5/RAID6, TCP segmentation and IEEE1588 hardware time stamping.