Advantech Boosts Packetarium and ATCA Blade Throughput with Highest Performance Cavium Networks 32-Core OCTEON II® CN6880 Processor

The new blades are based on the Cavium Networks (NASDAQ: CAVM) CN6880 OCTEON® II processor with the high-end ATCA blade featuring dual processors 32 MIPS64® cores for a total of 64x 64-bit cores per blade. The ATCA PPE is targeted at high-end control, service and dataplane applications in 4G/LTE networks while the Packetarium™ NCPB PPE is optimized for converged voice, video and data applications typical of cloud computing and security applications such as Unified Threat Management (UTM) and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).

“This is our first ATCA product based on the Cavium OCTEON processor and the third OCTEON-based blade for our Packetarium product line,” said Byron Lin, Director of Advantech’s Networks and Telecom Group. “The NCPB-2320 with 32 cores is a natural step up for our Packetarium customers using our 12-core OCTEON CN5650 or 6-core OCTEON II CN6335 blades. Packetarium, our cost-effective alternative to ATCA, now has a new, higher-end processor blade that extends its appeal to a broader range of packet processing applications,” continued Lin. “The enterprise markets find its 40% cost savings over ATCA particularly appealing. And with these new blades we have also laid the foundation for more capable I/O subsystems and additional acceleration technologies just around the corner.”

The ATCA-7310 is another example of Advantech’s technology reuse strategy, implementing industry-leading processor architectures in multiple form factors allowing customers to choose platforms with the best price and performance point for their specific applications while protecting their significant software investments.

“The OCTEON II 68XX is the first 64-bit processor to provide 48 GHz of compute power on a single chip across 32 cores, and provides triple the GHz per chip and 2 to 5x better performance/watt than other available standards-based solutions,” said YJ Kim, General Manager, Infrastructure Processor Group, Cavium Networks. “The OCTEON processor product line integrates industry leading application acceleration engines for DPI, compression/decompression and new security standards such as SNOW3G. These capabilities are ideally suited for the 4G network and enterprise applications targeted by Advantech.”

The ATCA-7310 supports up to 64GB of DDR3-1066 memory with a Broadcom BCM56841 40GbE switch. Four 10G/40G Fabric interfaces (40GBaseKR4, 10GBaseKX4) are supported with 12 lanes of 10GbE to the RTM for uplinks. The new blade also provides support for dynamic clock and cores management, console server, remote upgrade and LMP boot image support HPM.1.

The NCPB-2320 supports up to 32GB of DDR3-1333 memory. Control plane functionality is provided by two PCIe x4 interfaces and data plane capabilities are supported by two 4x SGMII, 1x XAUI or 1x DXAUI depending on the carrier.