page_title: PowerPC 400
section_title: PowerPC 440
hierarchical_section_title: PowerPC 400 / Variants / PowerPC 440
caption_attribution_description: English: 533 MHz AMCC PowerPC 440SPe processor from a RAID card in an Apple Xserve.
context_page_description: The PowerPC 400 family is a line of 32-bit embedded RISC processor cores based on the PowerPC or Power ISA instruction set architectures. The cores are designed to fit inside specialized applications ranging from system-on-a-chip microcontrollers, network appliances, application-specific integrated circuits and field-programmable gate arrays to set-top boxes, storage devices and supercomputers.
  Applied Micro Circuits Corporation bought assets concerning the 400 family cores from IBM in April 2004 for $227 million, and they now market the processors under their own name. IBM continues evolving the cores while supplying design and foundry services around the cores. Several cores are also available for licensing by OEMs from IBM and Synopsys.
context_section_description: Introduced in 1999, the PowerPC 440 was the first PowerPC core from IBM to include the Book E extension to the PowerPC specification. It also included the CoreConnect bus technology designed to be the interface between the parts inside a PowerPC based system-on-a-chip (SoC) device.
  It is a high-performance core with separate 32 KB instruction and data L1 caches, a seven-stage out-of-order dual-issue pipeline, supporting speeds of up to 800 MHz and L2 caches up to 256 KB. The core lacks a floating point unit (FPU) but it has an associated four-stage FPU that can be included using the APU (Auxiliary Processing Unit) interface. The 440 core adheres to the Power ISA v.2.03 using the Book III-E specification.
  Xilinx currently incorporates one or two cores (depending on the member of the family) into the Virtex-5 FXT FPGA.
  Both AMCC and IBM are developing and marketing stand alone processors using 440 cores. IBM and Synopsys also offers fully synthesized cores.
  BRE440 Rad Hard SOC
  Broad Reach Engineering has used the IBM 440 synthesized core to build a radiation-hardened embedded SoC that includes various peripherals (two ethernet MACs, PCI, memory controllers, DMA controllers, EDAC and SIO), 32 KB of L1 cache, and 256 KB of L2 cache. This device was built using the Honeywell HX5000 rad hard process at 150 nm. The BRE440 runs at clock speeds ranging from tens of MHz up to 150 MHz.
  QCDOC
  QCDOC is a custom supercomputer built to solve small but extremely computationally demanding problems in quantum physics. It uses custom 440-based ASICs to obtain a peak performance of approximately 10 TFLOPS.
  Blue Gene/L
  Dual 440 cores are used in the processors powering IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer, which until June 2008 ranked number one on the list of the top 500 supercomputers around the world, with a peak performance of nearly 500 teraFLOPS in 2008.
  SeaStar
  The 440 core is also used in the Cray XT3, XT4 and XT5 supercomputers, where its SeaStar,  SeaStar2 and SeaStar2+ communication processors closely couples HyperTransport memory interface with routing to other nodes in supercomputer clusters. The SeaStar device provides a 6.4 GB/s connection to the Opteron based processors across HyperTransport (together making a processing element, PE), as well as six 7.6 GB/s links to neighboring PEs. SeaStar2+ offers 9.6 GB/s intra-node bandwidth and error correcting functionality to intercept errors en route between computing nodes.
  AMCC 460
  The PowerPC 460EX and 460GT from AMCC are, despite their name, processors with the 440 core. They are available at 0.6 to 1.2 GHz and have integrated controllers for DDR or DDR2 SDRAM, USB 2.0, PCIe, SATA, and Gigabit Ethernet.
  Titan
  Intrinsity designed the now defunct Titan core for AppliedMicro from the ground up using the PowerPC 440 core spec. AppliedMicro used the Titan core in their APM832xx family high performance system on a chip products but these parts never came to market.
  Virtex-5 FXT
  In its Virtex-5 FXT FPGA product line, Xilinx embeds up to two PPC440 cores. The embedded PPC440 has a maximum frequency of 550 MHz, and connects to the surrounding FPGA-fabric through a special crossbar switch, increasing the Virtex-5 FXT family's system performance over 2.6 times compared to the Virtex-4 FX family's embedded PPC405.
  LSI SAS
  LSI uses the PowerPC 440 core in a number of its SAS controller chips, including the widely used SAS2008 variant.
  Acalis CPU872
  The Acalis CPU872 is a highly specialized Security SoC chip built by CPU Tech. It is designed for highly sensitive and mission critical systems such as military applications. It has provisions to prevent tampering and reverse engineering and is manufactured at IBM's highly secure Trusted Foundry. It has embedded DRAM,  dual 440 cores with dual precision FPUs and auxiliary computing units providing acceleration and protection for communications, complex algorithms and synchronization between cores.
caption: A 533 MHz AMCC PowerPC 440SPe processor from a RAID card in an Apple Xserve.
exif: {}