Netronome Samples 40-Core Network Flow Processors for 40 and 100 Gbps Designs

Netronome has begun sampling its NFP-3240 processor to major network equipment suppliers. Netronome's Network Flow Processor packs an array of 40 1.4GHz microengine RISC cores and is designed for tight coupling with multicore Intel processors. Target applications include network, security and content processing platforms operating at 40 and 100 Gbps rates. Customer designs include shared service blades in switches and routers, 3G and LTE wireless infrastructure, security appliances and virtualized servers. The first commercial network boxes based on the processor are expected to reach production in the second half of 2010.


"We are pleased that the companies designing-in the NFP-3240 are among the world's largest network equipment manufacturers," said Niel Viljoen, founder and CEO of Netronome."Netronome is in its third year of record revenues and as the market for network flow processors continues to expand, we expect our growth to accelerate."




Highlights of the new NFP-32xx network flow processors include:


High-Performance: Up to 40 multi-threaded programmable networking cores running at 1.4GHz enable the NFP to deliver over 56 billion instructions per second with 320 hardware threads that optimize memory utilization. This yields 1800 instructions per packet at 30 million packets per second, enabling 20Gbps of L2-L7 deep packet processing with line-rate security and I/O virtualization for millions of simultaneous flows.


Power Efficiency: Operating at only 15 to 35 watts, the NFP-32xx delivers more than four times the power efficiency of its closest competitor.


Software-Defined I/O: Unlike fixed-function ASICs and configurable NPUs, Netronome's NFPs are fully programmable processors. Software-defined I/O supports both L2-L3 packet processing and L4-L7 application- and content-aware deep packet inspection. This programmability, coupled with line rate packet processing, provides the highest level of inspection and throughput available in the industry for traditional NPU applications such as high-performance line cards.


Network Virtualization in Silicon: Virtualized multicore CPUs are increasingly used in switches, routers, and network appliances for control, data plane, security and other networking applications. To scale network performance to 10Gbps and beyond the NFP-32xx offers a PCIe v2.0 implementation including extended SR-IOV with 256 queues to provide guaranteed bandwidth and low latency access to shared I/O devices. Netronome's SR-IOV drivers include configurable algorithms for load balancing to virtualized multicore CPUs and efficient zero-copy mechanisms that significantly improve CPU, memory and system bandwidth utilization. In addition to eight PCIe lanes, the NFP supports a wide range of popular high-speed network interfaces including dual 25Gbps Interlaken, SPI-4.2 and dual 10Gbps XAUI.


Integrated Hardware Acceleration for Security, Content and Parallel Processing: Unified computing architectures place extensive security requirements on the network. Ranging from coarse policy enforcement using IEEE 802.1AE LinkSec to granular and stateful flow-based applications such as IPsec and SSL, security processing is now required for the majority of network traffic. The NFP provides 20Gbps of line rate security processing by embedding hardware acceleration in a programmable dataplane, including cryptography engines, PKI engines, dedicated hardware for true random number generation, and support for in-line and look-aside security processing designs.
http://www.netronome.com