Communications processor simplifies NFV and SDN

1st April 2014

Broadcom

Nat Bowers

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Expanding the company's XLPII multi-core communications processor family, Broadcom has announced the XLP500 series with 32 NXCPUs and performance up to 80Gb/s. According to the manufacturer, the communications processor delivers up to four times the per-core performance of competing processors.

The XLP500 Series delivers the superior processing performance and agility needed to simplify Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) deployment. Performance is achieved with an innovative quad-issue, quad-threaded superscalar architecture with out-of-order execution. Support for Broadcom's Open NFV platform and seamless interoperability with Broadcom's StrataXGS Switch series streamlines the development process, optimises power requirements, reduces hardware costs and improves time to market.

Complementing Broadcom's XLP200 and XLP900 series, the XLP500 series provides customers with more choices within the XLPII family of products, enabling the deployment of a wide range of products, including high-end SDN control plane applications, leveraging a single common software platform.

Chris O'Reilly, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Processors & Wireless Infrastructure, Broadcom, commented: "For service providers and data centre operators looking to manage dynamically changing workloads and massive data requirements, the XLP500 series provides the processing performance and flexibility required to deploy new services and cost-effectively scale the network. With the addition of the XLP500 Series, Broadcom now offers the industry's broadest end-to-end portfolio of 28nm multi-core communications processors, spanning 4 NXCPUs to 640 NXCPUs."

"In order to facilitate a successful industry-wide NFV rollout, HP's OpenNFV program requires an open platform to easily migrate virtual functions across systems and a new class of processors that can improve packet processing, help reduce hardware costs, simplify applications and improve time-to-market," said Vinay Saxena, Chief Architect, Network Functions Virtualization, Hewlett Packard. "We believe our collaboration with Broadcom on its Open NFV platform, and communications processors such as the XLP500 Series, are ideally suited to deliver the right balance of power, performance and workload flexibility needed to meet the requirements of NFV solutions."