Advanced Micro Devices Inc has given a new twist to its long- running range of Elan embedded processors, adding a debugging system to help developers of embedded operating systems and applications to trace system failures. The company hopes to sell the ElanSC250 to manufacturers of networking and telecommunications hardware and internet appliances.
AMD has based the chip around a supercharged version of the venerable 486 core – the 5×86. John Marc Woosley, product marketing manager at AMD’s Embedded Processor Division, said that the chip rated somewhere between Intel Corp’s Pentium P100 and P133 desktop processors on the performance scale. The Elan clocks at 133MHz, has 16k of onboard cache and runs on 1.6 watts of power. The chip has a PCI bus interface and SDRAM memory interfaces.
However, the biggest change that AMD has made to the chip is to include serial interface into the chip and 256k trace cache that allows developers to access trace route and register information. The trace cache would record up to 6,000 lines of code, Woosley said. This could be accessed by developers for debugging OS kernels or while developing applications. He said that the cache could also be used when tracing back the reasons for a system’s failure.
General sampling of the ElanSC250 is expected to begin in the fourth quarter 1999, with volume production slated for Q1 2000. Pricing is planned to start at $38 for the 133-MHz ElanSC520 in 10,000 unit quantities.
