What is the PowerPC e500?
By Marcus Reynolds
What is the PowerPC e500?
The PowerPC e500 is a 32-bit microprocessor core from Freescale Semiconductor. The core is compatible with the older PowerPC Book E specification as well as the Power ISA v.2.03. It has a dual issue, seven-stage pipeline with FPUs (from version 2 onwards), 32/32 KiB data and instruction L1 caches and 256, 512 or 1024 KiB L2 frontside cache.
What are the main features of the e500mc?
The e500mc has the following features: Power ISA v.2.06, which includes hypervisor and virtualization functionality for embedded platforms. The “classic” floating-point unit has been reinstated. SPE, SPESFP, and DPESFP are all removed, and the integer register file is back to 32 bits.
How many versions of the e500 core are there?
There are three versions of the e500 core, namely the original e500v1, the e500v2 and the e500mc . A 64-bit evolution of the e500mc core is called the e5500 core and was introduced in 2010, and a subsequent e6500 core added multithreading capabilities in 2012. Support for the SPE (Signal Processing Engine) extensions.
What is the difference between e500mc and e5500 and e6500?
A 64-bit evolution of the e500mc core is called the e5500 core and was introduced in 2010, and a subsequent e6500 core added multithreading capabilities in 2012. Support for the SPE (Signal Processing Engine) extensions. The integer register file is extended to a width of 64-bits. The non-SPE instructions only access and write to the low 32-bits.
What is the PowerQUICC e500v1/e500v2 core?
All PowerQUICC 85xx devices are based on e500v1 or e500v2 cores, most of them on the latter. In June 2008 Freescale announced the QorIQ brand, microprocessors based on the e500 family of cores.
What are the key differences between the e500v1 and e500v2?
Key improvements in the e500v2 over the e500v1 include: Increase from 32-bit (4 GiB) to 36-bit (64 GiB) physical address space. This change means that e500v2-based devices often use a more advanced board support package (BSP) than e500v1-based devices, as various peripheral units have moved to physical addresses higher than 4 GiB.
What devices does the ppce500 machine support?
The ppce500 machine supports the following devices: Multicore Programmable Interrupt Controller (MPIC) with MSI support 1 Freescale Enhanced Triple Speed Ethernet controller (eTSEC) The ppce500 machine automatically generates a device tree blob (“dtb”) which it passes to the guest, if there is no -dtb option.
