Processor Start-Up P.A. Semi Joins EEMBC Board of Directors

EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. — March 20, 2007 — The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium today announced that P.A. Semi, a fabless semiconductor start-up that last month began sampling products from its new PWRficient™ processor family, has become EEMBC’s newest member.

P.A. Semi joins EEMBC as a member of the consortium’s board of directors, with full voting rights on all major issues decided by the consortium, plus full access to all of the EEMBC® benchmarks.

“P.A. Semi and EEMBC share a keen awareness of the growing importance of processor energy consumption and multicore processors,” said Markus Levy, EEMBC president. “We are thus looking forward to the contribution that P.A. Semi will make to the consortium as EEMBC’s EnergyBench tool continues to gain traction in the marketplace and more and more designers recognize the importance of measuring processor energy consumption with respect to strictly defined workloads according to standardized criteria.”

P.A. Semi’s dual-core PA6T-1682M PWRficient processor is based on IBM’s Power Architecture™. The 1682M features two 2-GHz processors (each with its own dual-integer, floating-point, and VMX vector-processing units), 2 MB of level-two cache, two DDR-2 memory controllers and hardware-assist engines for TCP/IP acceleration, security, CRC checksum, and XOR computation. The device also integrates a flexible I/O subsystem that supports eight PCI Express controllers, two 10-Gigabit Ethernet controllers, and four Gigabit Ethernet controllers that share 24 configurable SERDES lanes.

“We are pleased to join EEMBC, as it provides a very comprehensive suite of standard embedded benchmarks that align very well with P.A. Semi’s target markets and customers,” said Peter Bannon, vice president of architecture and verification at P.A. Semi. “We look forward to being able to showcase the performance and power of our dual-core PWRficient processors using EEMBC’s various benchmark suites and EnergyBench tool.”

P.A. Semi was established in 2003 by industry veterans including Dan Dobberpuhl, the lead designer of the DEC Alpha and StrongARM microprocessors and the first multicore system on chip, the SiByte 1250. P.A. Semi’s PWRficient processors are based on, and fully software-compatible with, the highly regarded Power Architecture™ instruction set, licensed to P.A. Semi by IBM. The company’s first dual-core system on chip processor, the PA6T-1682M, is targeted at the high-performance embedded computing and control markets.

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About EEMBC
EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, develops and certifies real-world benchmarks and benchmark scores to help designers select the right embedded processors for their systems. Every processor submitted for EEMBC benchmarking is tested for parameters representing different workloads and capabilities in communications, networking, consumer, office automation, automotive/industrial, embedded Java, and network storage-related applications. With members including leading semiconductor, intellectual property, and compiler companies, EEMBC establishes benchmark standards and provides certified benchmarking results through the EEMBC Technology Center.