Stefan Mileschin

AppliedMicro (AMCC) announced the availability of the Catalina SoC (APM86491) for low power and cost effective NAS systems today. The previous generation version (APM82181) was the heart of the Western Digital My Book Live reviewed by us last year as well as the recently launched My Book Live Duo.

Serving to remind us that the PowerPC architecture is still around in consumer devices, the new platform manages to reduce the cost of USB 3.0 enabled NAS systems by integrating two USB 3.0 controllers (one host and one host/device) in the SoC. In the USB 3.0 enabled NAS systems we have seen so far, the controllers are from NEC or Fresco Logic, and they interface with one of the PCI-E lanes in the SoC / chipset. By integrating the USB 3.0 controller, the BOM cost is bound to get reduced.

AppliedMicro also indicated that the Catalina SoC has QoS, TCP offload and packet classification engines to help interface better with 802.11ac radios connected to either of the SoC's two PCI-E ports. In addition to the two PCI-E and two USB 3.0 ports, we also have two SATA ports and two GbE ports. Instead of targeting the SMB market with support for 4 or more bays, this solution seems to be geared towards an all-in-one appliance with the ability to function as a router, a wireless access point as well as a network attached storage device.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5326/a...-nas-platforms