Texas Instruments and 6WIND announce packet processing software optimized for TI’s KeyStone II multicore processors

This enables OEMs to more easily design high performance, software upgradeable, power- and cost-efficient networking platforms for mobile and cloud infrastructure applications.

The 6WINDGate software provides a proven solution to the challenges of performance, scalability, software compatibility and time-to-market faced by developers of high-end networking equipment. 6WINDGate includes a full set of control plane modules, a high performance networking stack and a wide range of data plane protocols that have been specifically optimized to deliver maximum performance on TI’s KeyStone II-based multicore processors. Maintaining full compatibility with standard Operating System APIs, the 6WINDGate fast path-based architecture enables OEMs to quickly migrate existing application software to TI’s KeyStone II architecture, allowing the use of TI’s on-chip network coprocessors, as well as reducing time to market and schedule risk.

“We are delighted to announce the addition of TI’s KeyStone II support to the 6WINDGate packet processing software,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “Because it addresses critical issues in network bandwidth, scalability and Quality-of-Service, 6WINDGate has been adopted by multiple tier-one TEMs and is now deployed in two-thirds of the LTE networks worldwide. Our recently announced 6WINDGate Cloud Edition solution extends these benefits to cloud infrastructure. We have worked closely with TI to implement optimized support for its KeyStone II multicore architecture within 6WINDGate and look forward to delivering high performance software solutions to TI’s OEM customers.”

“We’re constantly looking for ways to push the envelope with our KeyStone II multicore processors,” said Ramesh Kumar, business manager, multicore processors, TI. “No multicore architecture matches the performance, flexibility and power efficiency of KeyStone II and our collaboration with 6WIND gives our customers the software support they need to quickly and easily develop high performance applications.”

TI’s scalable KeyStone II architecture includes support for both TMS320C66x digital signal processors (DSP) generation cores and multiple cache coherent quad ARM® Cortex™-A15 clusters, for a mixture of up to 32 DSP and RISC cores. The multicore architecture includes capacity expansion for SoC structural elements such as TeraNet, Multicore Navigator and Multicore Shared Memory Controller (MSMC). This expansion allows developers to fully utilize the capability of all processing elements, including ARM RISC cores, DSP cores and enhanced AccelerationPacs. RISC processing within KeyStone II has been significantly upgraded with the addition of quad ARM Cortex -A15 clusters, providing ultra-high performance at half the power consumption of traditional RISC cores.

Availability
6WINDGate support for TI’s KeyStone II multicore processors will be available in the second half of 2012.