CriticalBlue Announces Optimized Prism Support for NetLogic Microsystems' Multi-core Processor Portfolio

By Criticalblue, PRNE
Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Strong Customer Demand Drives Release of Prism Platform Support Packages for NetLogic Microsystems' XLP(R), XLR(R) and XLS(R) Multi-Core Processor Families

SAN JOSE and SANTA CLARA, California, April 27, 2011 - CriticalBlue, a pioneer in embedded multicore software analysis,
exploration and verification tools, announced today the immediate
availability of support for NetLogic Microsystems' industry-leading XLP(R),
XLR(R), and XLS(R) multi-core processor families within its Prism product.
Software developers can now analyze their existing software applications,
quickly evaluate NetLogic Microsystems' best-in-class multi-core processors,
and accelerate the selection and design using these multi-core processors.

This announcement broadens CriticalBlue's Prism capabilities with leading
multi-core vendors such as NetLogic Microsystems. Further enhancements to the
end user experience using NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processors will
continue to be made available throughout the year.

NetLogic Microsystems' XLP processor family features the industry's first
and only quad-issue, quad-threaded communications processor architecture in
the advanced 40nm process with unparalleled processing performance and
scalability up to 128 NXCPUs(TM). Each NXCPU operates at up to 2.0 GHz and is
based on a best-in-class superscalar engine and out-of-order execution
capabilities for converged data plane and control plane processing. The
multi-core, multi-threaded processor offers a tri-level cache architecture
with over 50 Mbytes of fully coherent on-chip cache which delivers 40
Terabits/sec of extremely high-speed on-chip memory bandwidth. The integrated
high-speed Inter-chip Coherency Interface (ICI) offers full cache and memory
coherency across the 128 NXCPUs, enabling software applications to seamlessly
run in Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) or Asymmetric Multi Processing (AMP)
modes. The unique combination of superior processor cores with scalability to
128 NXCPUs and over 160 programmable processing engines deliver over 160Gbps
throughput and 240 million packets per second (Mpps) of intelligent
application processing performance, making it the industry's highest
performance multi-core communications processors for intelligent Layers 4-7
network, services and application processing.

"NetLogic Microsystems is a leading player in the multi-core silicon
market and we have seen direct customer demand for support of their platforms
inside Prism for projects targeting base stations, packet transport and
packet core systems." said David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue. "The ongoing
development program with NetLogic Microsystems will take today's released
support and enhance it further so that Prism can even more accurately and
completely represent the behavior of end users' software running on NetLogic
Microsystems' multi-core processors."

"Our XLP, XLR, and XLS multi-core processor families continue to lead the
industry in performance, functionality and power profile," said Chris
O'Reilly
, vice president of marketing at NetLogic Microsystems. "Our
collaboration with CriticalBlue enables our customers to use Prism and get a
positive experience, as they migrate towards and adopt our multi-core
platforms."

Prism is an award winning, EclipseTM-based embedded multi-core
programming system which allows software engineers to realize the full
potential of multi-core processors without significant changes to their
existing development flow. Prism analyzes the behavior of code running on
hardware development boards, virtual machines or simulators. It allows
engineers to take their existing sequential or multithreaded code and, before
making any changes, explore and analyze opportunities to introduce or add
further concurrency. Having identified the optimal parallelization strategies
in this way, developers code a parallel implementation, and then reuse Prism
to verify performance efficiency and thread-safe operations.

In addition to partitioning software onto multicore hardware, results of
this development program enable developers to use Prism to quantify the
benefit of software migration onto NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core
processors. Developers can select the appropriate processor from the XLP, XLR
and XLS families and analyze the impact of the built-in hardware threading,
data cache misses, and instruction throughput on a thread, function or source
line level, resulting in an ability to see the impact of such core
architectural features on the overall concurrent schedule. This important
feedback to the software programmer would be extremely difficult to visualize
otherwise. Ultimately, Prism provides developers with an estimate of the
performance gain achievable by partitioning their program into multiple
threads while targeting one of NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processors,
as well as providing a methodology and flow to implement, tune and verify
that multi-threaded software.

The Core-level Platform Support Package (PSP) for Prism targeting XLP,
XLR, and XLS multi-core processors is offered at a price of $400 (USD) per
month with an annual subscription agreement. Download a 30-day evaluation
copy of Prism for NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processor families at
www.criticalblue.com/prism/netlogic.

Key Points:

- This announcement enables faster development and improved optimization
of multicore software applications and hence accelerates time to market of
end products based on NetLogic Microsystems' multi-core processor families.

- Integration with Prism allows NetLogic Microsystems' customers to
analyze their existing single threaded application code for use on multi-core
processors and follow a simple migration path through implementation,
performance tuning and verification.

- Prism technology is an Eclipse plug-in and is based on dynamic tracing
of the users' software execution in a Linux target environment.

- Developers work in a familiar Eclipse environment with CriticalBlue's
Prism development tools.

About CriticalBlue

CriticalBlue is a pioneer of flexible, automated system design solutions
that meet the increasing performance, power, and cost demands associated with
the delivery of advanced electronic products within today's demanding design
schedules. The increasing use of complex, multicore processor architectures
has accelerated demand for CriticalBlue's technology and expertise throughout
all electronic industry sectors. Headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, with
offices in San Jose, California, and Tokyo, Japan, the company has delivered
multiple solutions for key aspects of embedded software design, including
Prism, a multicore embedded software design environment, and Cascade, a
software accelerator synthesis technology. The company is funded by European,
US Silicon Valley, Japanese venture capitalists and corporate investors. To
learn more, please visit www.criticalblue.com

About NetLogic Microsystems

NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NETL) is a worldwide leader in
high-performance intelligent semiconductor solutions that are powering
next-generation Internet networks. NetLogic Microsystems' best-in-class
products perform highly differentiated tasks of accelerating complex network
traffic to significantly enhance the performance and functionality of
advanced 3G/4G mobile wireless infrastructure, data center, enterprise, metro
Ethernet, edge and core infrastructure networks. NetLogic Microsystems'
market-leading product portfolio includes high-performance multi-core
processors, knowledge-based processors, content processors, network search
engines, ultra low-power embedded processors and high-speed 10/40/100 Gigabit
Ethernet PHY solutions. These products are designed into high-performance
systems such as switches, routers, wireless base stations, security
appliances, networked storage appliances, service gateways and connected
media devices offered by leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
NetLogic Microsystems is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has
offices and design centers throughout North America, Asia and Europe. For
more information about products offered by NetLogic Microsystems, call
+1-408-454-3000 or visit the NetLogic Microsystems Web site at
www.netlogicmicro.com.

NetLogic Microsystems, the NetLogic Microsystems logo and Putting
Intelligence in the Network, XLP, XLR, and XLS are trademarks or registered
trademarks of NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. All other trademarks are properties
of their respective owners. All product or service names mentioned herein are
the trademarks of their respective owners.

CriticalBlue Media Contact: David Stewart, +1-408-573-3609, david.stewart at criticalblue.com; NetLogic Microsystems Contact: Alex Pantelis, +1-408-454-3122, apantelis at netlogicmicro.com

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