Cavium Announces New Low Power Dual and Quad Core OCTEON III SoC Processors

Global IP traffic will increase 3 fold in the next 5 years and will reach 1.4 zettabytes (equivalent to 350 Billion DVDs) by 2017, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, 2012-2017. The rising volume of networked devices combined with new high bandwidth access technologies such as 802.11ac, LTE and FTTH, is driving the need for higher performance at every node in the network from broadband access to the enterprise to the core. The CN70XX and CN71XX families addresses this need in a broad range of applications including Wired and Wireless Gateways, 802.11ac access points, Switches, Routers, UTM/Security Appliances, Network Attached Storage and more.

Cavium’s new OCTEON III single, dual and quad-core SoCs deliver an unprecedented amount of compute performance per chip enabling superb throughput and headroom to handle a broad range of applications. The new CN70xx and CN71xx families are available in a small foot print plastic LBGA package and are targeted for low power and low cost applications. The CN70XX and CN71XX are entry level members of the OCTEON III family which will provide the industry’s widest line of multi core processors supporting up to 48 cores at core frequencies up to 2.5GHz. The new members of the OCTEON III family support full hardware virtualization that allows applications to be 'firewalled' from each other, legacy and newer operating systems to run concurrently and also enables live in-service upgrades. The broad range of connectivity options includes GbE, 10GbE XAUI, SATA 3.0, USB 3.0 and PCIe controllers.

The families incorporate a whole range of sophisticated power management techniques including Power Optimizer to reduce active power and support for Hibernate, Standby and Idle modes of operations that help slash overall power consumption.

“Our new low power family of CN70XX/71XX OCTEON III processors are ideally suited to drive a whole range of control and data plane processing applications” said Steve Klinger, Senior Director, Infrastructure Products Group, Cavium, Inc. “These new products set a new bar for performance per watt & performance per dollar.”

Cavium provides a comprehensive carrier grade SDK which includes development tools, optimized libraries and application software. Cavium has a broad range PACE ecosystem software, hardware and ODM partners including: 6Wind, Apogee, Bitdefender, Broadweb, D2 Tech, ENEA, Entropic, Embedded Planet, Kaspersky, MontaVista, NetStar, Procera, QosMos, Sensory Networks, Silicon Labs, TeamF1, Telus, Wind River and more.

OCTEON III CN70XX and CN71XX Family Highlights:

-Unprecedented Compute Performance in 28nm Process
-Up to 6.4 GHz – 4 cores at up to 1.6GHz
-Capable of running 3 x 3, dual band 802.11ac & 802.11n at full line rate even while supporting >32 streams/clients and campus security

-Powerful Hardware Acceleration & Wide Range of IO
-Integrated Hardware Virtualization
-Market-Leading Hardware Deep Packet Inspection with up to 5 Gbps Protocol/Application detection
-Advanced Hardware Cryptography – RSA, SSL, IPSec, SHA-3, ZUCC
-SATA 3.0, USB 3.0, 1GbE/10GbE, DDR3/4 and three PCIe controllers

-Ultra Low Power SKUs enabling sub-3W operation
-Low Cost Plastic LBGA package
-Rich Software Suite
-Comprehensive SDK3 with Linux 3.x kernel and Simple Exec available
-Full Carrier Grade MontaVista CGE7 SDK available
-Enterprise class Linux Networking off-load modules for fast path
-Complete TurboDPI solution for Deep Packet Inspection
-Complete TurboSTOR solution for NAS appliances