The part, the Spear-1310 is implemented in a 55-nm CMOS process technology and intended for embedded applications including communications, computer peripherals and industrial control, ST said.

The dual ARM Cortex-A9 processors support both fully symmetric and asymmetric operations, at clock frequencies of up to 600-MHz to provide 3000 dhrystone MIPS of performance. The chip is equipped with an integrated DDR2/DDR3 memory controller and a set of connectivity peripherals, including, USB, SATA, PCIe with integrated PHY and a Giga Ethernet MAC.

"Spear 1310 is the first device in the recently announced Spear1300 family and others will follow shortly," said Loris Valenti, General Manager of STMicroelectronics' Computer Systems Division. "With its innovative architecture and powerful feature set, Spear1310 is at the leading edge of the embedded processor market and enables an unprecedented mix of cost competitiveness, performance and flexibility."

Samples of the Spear1310 are available to some potential customers for evaluation and prototyping, ST said.

Further information on ST's SPEAr family of embedded microprocessor System-on-Chip ICs is available at www.st.com/spear.