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Citius, Altius, Fortius
XAP5 Goes for Gold
(Jim Turley)
Better, stronger, faster. Isn’t that what every new microprocessor is supposed to deliver? Hope springs eternal in the breast of many a processor-marketing drone. Their new chip isn’t just better than the previous one, it’s better than everyone else’s, too.
And you know, sometimes that promise actually comes true. A case in point is the XAP5 processor from Cambridge Consultants, a company of consultants located in – wait for it – Cambridge, England. Actually, they’re located in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well, a choice of venue that’s both convenient and confusing. Either way, this bicoastal team of engineers has cooked up a fifth generation of their XAP processor, a 16-bit CPU designed to minimize both power consumption and code space.
XAP5 is no mere tweak, nor is Cambridge Consultants your run-of-the-mill house for frequently unemployed geeks and frustrated processor designers. Au contraire, the firm employs more than 300 engineers from all disciplines (mechanical engineers, industrial designers, programmers, etc.), and the company has already shipped its billionth (that’s with a B) XAP processor. Most of the world’s Bluetooth headsets and Bluetooth-enabled phones have an embedded XAP processor, according to the company. That puts XAP’s all-time sales volume in the same league as the venerable 68K, x86, and 6805 processors. In other words, XAP is no mere science project. It may just be the most popular processor you’ve never heard of.
That’s swell, but what does XAP5 do for today’s struggling programmer or hardware engineer? Quite a lot, really, if said programmer/engineer is willing to design an ASIC around the XAP5 core. You see, XAP5 isn’t available as a packaged chip, only as licensed IP. That means that, unless you’re taking on the crushing cost and complexity of an ASIC-development project, XAP5 isn’t for you. That’s a shame, because it would be a great little processor for a range of low-cost but high-volume products. [more]
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