Cavium Scales its OCTEON II Processor Line

Cavium Networks is extending its family of OCTEON II processors with four new processor lines that integrate one to ten cnMIPS64 cores. The additions expand both low and mid range options in a fully software compatible manner with other members of the OCTEON II and OCTEON Plus family, enabling enterprise, data center and service provider equipment including routers, switches, appliances, 3G/4G wireless base stations, RNCs, xGSNs, evolved packet core, services gateways, DPI equipment, storage switches and intelligent server adapters. In addition, Cavium is introducing four new, unique technologies in Octeon II to achieve lower power, deep packet inspection, virtualization and anti-counterfeiting.


The OCTEON II family combines multiple cnMIPS64 R2 cores along with L2-L7 application and security acceleration engines, virtualization features and 100Mbps - 100Gbps of connectivity. The custom designed cnMIPS™ cores implement an enhanced MIPS64 R2 instruction-set and have been architected to deliver superior performance per area along with dedicated compute and cache resources essential for deterministic, low-latency performance.


The newly introduced OCTEON II processors and target applications include:


CN60XX (1 - 2 Cores): WLAN Access points (AP), Entry-level VPN/UTM/Firewalls, Low-cost Control Plane applications, Satellite and Broadband Gateways.


CN61XX and CN62XX (2 -- 4 Cores): Enterprise Switches & Routers with Integrated Data and Control, High-performance Control Plane, UTM & Security Appliances, Printers, Small to Medium Business (SMB) and Low to Mid-range Enterprise class NAS/iSCSI appliances.


CN66XX (6 -- 10 cores): WAN Optimization, Enterprise, Data Center and Storage applications requiring 2x10GbE performance and connectivity and High-performance 3G/4G Base Stations.


These new processors incorporate a range of hardware accelerators including L2-L7 application and security acceleration engines, TCP offload, load balancing, compression and support for virtualization.


The four new technologies in OCTEON II include:


1. Power Optimizer that dynamically adjusts power in real time depending upon the application-level processing requirement, without the need to adjust CPU voltage or clock frequency. Now application developers can specify the maximum power that a program is allowed to consume on a per core basis.


2. "Hyper Finite Automata" (HFA) provides the industry's best Deep Packet Inspection solution by combining both DFA and NFA architectures into one cohesive solution. Performance is unchanged regardless of the number of rules and number of flows that are processed.


3. "EmVisor" provides unprecedented hardware support for a complete SoC virtualization. Now OCTEON II CPUs can act like a series of Virtual SoCs, each with their own virtual memory, Ethernet ports, PCIe Bus and EmVisor also provides a virtual switch between Virtual SoCs. This also enables in-field software upgrades in customer equipment.


4. "Authentik" is a technology that allows the whole multi-core processing chip to be locked; so that OEMs that entrust third parties to assemble their systems can be assured that no rogue or counterfeit copies of their systems are also being manufactured.
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