Freescale “motherboard-on-chip” processor powers LimePC’s Web 2.0-enabled ultra-mobile PCs
(Product News, 17 Jan 2008 )
Freescale’s MPC5121e processor powers LimePC’s full line of affordable, compact computing products, including UMPCs, pad-style PCs with large touchpad LCD screens, notebook and desktop PCs, and mini-ITX developer kits. LimePC’s consumer PC products will feature one or more MPC5121e processors and a LimeOS and LimeSuite applications software bundle. Connectivity includes USB 2.0, 802.11g WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 EDR wireless capabilities, as well as 10/100 Ethernet for desktops. Initially available in the China market, the LimePC products are planned to be available in the United States by the 2008 holiday season.
LimeOS is a full-screen HTML rendering environment or “desktop” that runs on top of an open source Debian Linux OS and server stack. LimeOS is designed from the ground up to embrace Web 2.0, multimedia, social and community activities. It leverages the underlying performance of the MPC5121e processor to deliver exceptional computing, wireless and mobile Internet capabilities at very affordable prices. To proliferate the combined LimeOS and Freescale mobileGT processor architecture, LimePC has launched the LimeFree open source community (www.limefree.org) for system developers.
Built on Power Architecture technology, the MPC5121e processor is the latest member of Freescale’s mobileGT processor family. Manufactured on Freescale’s 90-nanometer low-power CMOS technology, the MPC5121e device is designed to deliver exceptional multimedia performance and feature-rich user interfaces within a low power envelope, without sacrificing flexibility and robustness.
The MPC5121e processor is built around an efficient triple-core architecture consisting of a Power Architecture core, a 3D-graphics processor core and a CD-quality audio processor core. The powerful 3D-graphics processor is engineered to provide a graphics pipeline capable of gaming-class 3D rendering while keeping the DRAM bandwidth requirements to a bare minimum. The triple-core MPC5121e architecture is designed to allow the costly distributed DRAM memory systems within a PC to be merged into a single shared DRAM memory system.
The MPC5121e device’s 32-bit Truecolor display controller provides the multi-plane blending capabilities to drive a wide range of display resolutions including 720p (1280x720) and WXGA (1366x768). The on-chip audio core provides a flexible, efficient audio DSP/RISC architecture engineered to off-load the CPU from audio ripping, playback and sound enhancement processing such as MP3, WMA and Ogg Vorbis.
