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=== Emergence of the MPU ===
[[Intel]]’s offering in the NPU market, the IXP[http://www.intel.com/design/network/products/npfamily/index.htm] product line, was a device with many processor cores they called micro-engines. The micro-engines were specialized for NPU tasks and had a special, IXP-specific instruction set but were general enough to allow the IXP to be programmed for a range of applications wider than some other NPUs. But because of the specialized nature of the micro-engines, users were faced with learning to program highly pipelined designs in a new environment, with new tools on a specialized target.
SiByte[http://www.broadcom.com/products/Enterprise-Networking/Communications-Processors], a start-up subsequently acquired by [[Broadcom]], took a similar path but using many standard [[MIPS architecture|MIPS]] cores instead of the proprietary micro-engines of the IXP family. This offered several important benefits: a standard development tool-set could be used including the [[GNU Project|GNU]] [[GNU Compiler Collection|compiler]] (although this was not always seamless and some users found it necessary to program in MIPS [[assembly language]] to meet performance targets). It was also possible to run the [[Linux]] [[operating system]] and applications on SiByte.
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