Cavium Unveils OCTEON Processors with 1 to 32 Cores

Cavium Networks introduced its next generation OCTEON II Internet Application Processor (IAP) family of multi-core MIPS64 processors designed 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. The OCTEON II IAP offers up to 4x performance over the existing and widely deployed OCTEON Plus processor family, with more than twice the performance/watt and performance/dollar. In addition, the new product family adds revolutionary new application acceleration engines.


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. Additionally OCTEON II features a 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 noted that over the past 2 years, general-purpose multi-core processors have become mainstream in embedded, networking, wireless, storage and high-bandwidth broadband applications. All major Tier-1 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.


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.


Over 20 industry partners announced their support for Cavium's OCTEON II.
http://www.caviumnetworks.com