Cavium Networks, Inc. (Cavium Networks), a US-based provider of integrated semiconductor processors, has introduced a new OCTEON II Internet Application Processor (IAP) family of multi-core MIPS64 processors. The OCTEON II IAP provides up to 4x performance, scalability, power and cost savings over the existing OCTEON Plus processor family. The new product family has a new application acceleration engines.

The new processor family is developed to fuel the voice, video and data convergence driven by cloud computing, virtualization, HD video over IP, Web 2.0 and mobile 3G/4G applications which require a many fold increase in packet processing, secure application delivery and quality of service (QoS) performance.

Over the past two years, general-purpose multi-core processors have become mainstream in embedded, networking, wireless, storage and high-bandwidth broadband applications. All major Tier-1 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the market have adopted multi-core processors and ported millions of lines-of-code of software, including proprietary operating systems, to achieve unprecedented gains in performance, power and cost savings. Multi-core designs span from fiber-to-the-home CPE (customer premise equipment) routers, 802.11n Wifi access points, and SME (small medium enterprise) routers to data center application delivery switches, service provider wireless gateways and core routers.

Cavium Networks OCTEON Multi-core MIPS64 processors have been a driving force for multi-core adoption at major Tier-1 networking, wireless, and storage OEMs worldwide. Cavium has simplified multi-core development by providing support for standard operating systems, GNU tool-chains; C/C++ based software applications and unique hardware acceleration engines with an advanced multi-core scheduler. Additionally Cavium Networks’s 100+ PACE ecosystem partners have delivered optimized OCTEON multi-core solutions across operating systems, development tools, applications, middleware and hardware platforms.

OCTEON II Internet Application Processor Family

The OCTEON II IAP family integrates 1 to 32 custom cnMIPS64 cores, up to 75 Application Acceleration Engines for QoS, packet processing, TCP, compression, encryption, RAID, de-duplication and regular expression and a flexible set of networking I/Os including gigabit Ethernet, 10 gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express Gen 2, USB2.0, serial Rapid I/O (sRIO) and Interlaken. OCTEON II features a revolutionary new Hyperconnect crossbar with low-latency and virtualization features, up to 400Gbps of DDR3 memory bandwidth, up to 100Gbps of network connectivity. Using an on-chip Power Optimizer the OCTEON II family consumes only 2W to 60W across the entire family. The OCTEON II Software Development Kit (SDK) builds upon the existing OCTEON SDK and includes Linux SMP, GNU Toolchain, Simple Executive for fast path applications, performance tools, simulator, feature rich APIs for hardware acceleration and an extensive set of examples. To accelerate customer development Cavium also offers production ready software toolkits and multi-core software architecture and design consulting services.

“Cavium has done more than simply combine a bunch of high-performance cores,” notes Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “The OCTEON II architecture is carefully balanced in the number of cores, frequency, hardware acceleration, multicore scheduling, internal interconnects, memory bandwidth and interfaces to provide a scalable and optimized solution that is necessary for its target applications.”

“Wind River’s portfolio of multi-core software products along with Cavium’s OCTEON family of processors have been deployed by a broad range of Tier-1 OEMs across North America, Europe, China and Japan,” said Ken Klein, president and CEO of Wind River. “Cavium’s OCTEON II family sets a new standard in performance and integration. Working closely together, we are providing the software foundation for customer applications to easily harness the full power of OCTEON II’s 32 cores.”

The OCTEON II family includes four different product lines: the CN68XX (16 to 32 cores), CN66XX (8 to 16 cores), CN63XX (2 to 6 cores) and CN62XX (1 to 4 cores). The first OCTEON II product line that will be commercially available will be the CN63XX which will be followed by the CN68XX.

The OCTEON II CN63XX Processor Family

The OCTEON II CN63XX is a massively integrated SOC with 2 to 6 MIPS64 cores and is targeted for mainstream high-volume applications including enterprise routers, switches, appliances, 3G/4G base stations and intelligent storage and server adapters.

The CN63XX family features include:

cnMIPS64 v2 Core and Caches: 2, 4 or 6 new superscalar, dual-issue MIPS64 R2 cores, each with 37KB I-cache, 32KB D-cache operating at up to 1.5 GHz for up to 9 GHz compute cycles along with 2MB of low-latency, feature rich L2 cache.

Application Acceleration Engines: Application hardware acceleration for networking, wireless and storage. OCTEON II’s Application Acceleration Manager enables linear scaling of performance across multiple cores. Additional engines include 3rd generation Deep Packet Inspection HFA (hyper finite automata) engines, Security acceleration including AES, RSA, ECC and SNOW 3G, TCP/IP packet processing, compression/decompression, data de-duplication, RAID processing, packet classification and quality of service.

Integrated Memory, System and Networking Interfaces: High-performance, low-latency, optimized 64-bit DDR3 memory controller with 100 Gbps DRAM bandwidth, integrated SGMII with IEEE 1588 timestamp, XAUI, PCIe Gen2 and sRIO interfaces with over 40Gbps aggregate bandwidth;

Low power: Power Optimizer and power management features that enable low power version available at under 7 watts and with a maximum high-end power of 17 watts.

“Cavium has maintained a breakneck pace of innovation by introducing a new market leading product family every two years since 2001,” said Syed Ali, president and CEO at Cavium Networks. “Each successive generation of Cavium products enabled the rapid growth of new markets including enterprise security, data center application delivery, intelligent routing, enterprise wireless and high bandwidth broadband. OCTEON II will fuel the growth of emerging hyper-network applications such as cloud computing, data center virtualization, smart storage, 4G/LTE wireless, HD video over the Internet and multimedia rich Web 2.0 applications.”