LSI packs16 A15 cores in basestation SoC

 LSI Corp., introduced its Axxia 5500 series, a family of 28nm basestation SoCs that pack up to 16 ARM Cortex A15 cores riding the new ARM CCN-504 interconnect.
The chips will not sample until fall, but LSI claims it has commitments from top tier basestation makers designing them into systems set to ship in 2014.
                The SoCs support up to 16 10Gbit/second Ethernet ports. They also use an array of speciliazed hardware accelarators passed on from existing LSI SoCs for security, packet
processing and other operations.
               LSI claims the Axxia 5500 will sport four times the control plane performance and 2.5 times the data plane performance of its existing 3400 series SoCs that use four PowerPC 476 cores.
With the new chips, LSI is following Freescale and others in a board shift to ARM cores in embedded processors.
             The SoCs do not include LSI's starcore DSPs the company contends top tier basestation makers prefer to use their own baseband ASICs. letting the LSI SoCs handle L2-L4 processing.