Date: 15/04/2009

New Cavium's OCTEON II processor with 4x performance boost over OCTEON Plus

Cavium networks has released new OCTEON II multicore MIPS64 based System on Chip (SoC) with 1 to 32 cores and up to 75 application acceleration engines.
The applications suggested for this device are networking, storage, wireless and video applications, which includes equipments such as fiber-to-the-home CPE routers, 802.11n Wifi access points, and SME routers.

Present convergence devices handle multiple streams of digital audio video and also the plain digitized-text from various sources simultaneously. Such digital packets from simple USB transceiver to high-speed fiber-connection and direct input from sources like cameras need to be handled simultaneously to provide glitch-free delay-free performance. Adding to this complexity is, the high definition type of video and audio content, which takes enormous processing time. A single core processor however fast cannot handle such data in real time. Future high performance convergence systems compulsorily need multi core processors to handle different streams of content simultaneously and efficiently to perform impressively.
These kinds of requirements are nearly met by this new classic multi-core processor from Cavium. It's kind of cutting edge technology if not a great breakthrough.

OCTEON II, which is called Internet application processor family offers 4x performance boost over its predecessor OCTEON Plus.
Once the semiconductor chips has multiple processor cores, managing and optimizing them is another big challenge. If optimized to maximum extent the performance of single device with multiple cores should be more than sum of its individual cores performance. Industry analysts have voted for this device with comments such as, "Cavium has done more than simply combine a bunch of high-performance cores"

WindRiver's CEO and President Ken Klein says, "Wind River's portfolio of multi-core software products along with Cavium's OCTEON family of processors have been deployed by a broad range of Tier-1 OEMs across North America, Europe, China and Japan," confirming the software support for developers.

The press release page of Cavium website dated 14th Apr 2009 is filled with at least 22 press release about companies in telecom and embedded domain partnering with Cavium in supporting OCTEON II. There are 20 embedded, telecom and other software developers who have announced their support for OCTEON II in separate press releases. The partnered companies include Zarlink, Qosmos, PLX Technology, NetLogic Microsystems, MontaVista, MIPS, Lauterbach, Lanner Electronics, Kaspersky Lab, Interphase, GDA Technologies, Fulcrum Microsystems, Enea, embedUR systems, D2 Technologies, Continuous Computing, Bayside Design, Advanced Thermal Solutions, Advantech, 6WIND, Wind River, and Radisys.

The technical details, price and availability of OCTEON II as provided by Cavium in its press release are,

The OCTEON II family includes four different product lines: the CN68XX (16 to 32 cores), CN66XX (8 to 16 cores), CN63XX (2 to 6 cores) and CN62XX (1 to 4 cores). The first OCTEON II product line that will be commercially available will be the CN63XX, which will be followed by the CN68XX.

The OCTEON II CN63XX Processor Family
The OCTEON II CN63XX is a massively integrated SOC with 2 to 6 MIPS64 cores and is targeted for mainstream high-volume applications including enterprise routers, switches, appliances, 3G/4G base stations and intelligent storage and server adapters.
The CN63XX family features include:
cnMIPS64 v2 Core and Caches: 2, 4 or 6 new superscalar, dual-issue MIPS64 R2 cores, each with 37KB I-cache, 32KB D-cache operating at up to 1.5 GHz for up to 9 GHz compute cycles along with 2MB of low-latency, feature rich L2 cache.
Application Acceleration Engines: Industry's most advanced Application hardware acceleration for networking, wireless and storage. OCTEON II's Application Acceleration Manager enables linear scaling of performance across multiple cores. Additional engines include 3rd generation Deep Packet Inspection HFA (hyper finite automata) engines, Security acceleration including AES, RSA, ECC and SNOW 3G, TCP/IP packet processing, compression/decompression, data de-duplication, RAID processing, packet classification and quality of service.
Integrated Memory, System and Networking Interfaces: High-performance, low-latency, optimized 64-bit DDR3 memory controller with 100 Gbps DRAM bandwidth, integrated SGMII with IEEE 1588 timestamp, XAUI, PCIe Gen2 and sRIO interfaces with over 40Gbps aggregate bandwidth
Low power: Power Optimizer and innovative power management features that enable extremely low power version available at under 7 watts and with a maximum high-end power of 17 watts.


Pricing and Availability
The OCTEON II CN63XX processors will be available in scalable options ranging from 2-core to 6-core versions running at 800MHz to 1.5GHz. These processors will be offered in two versions namely Control Plane (CP) and Application Acceleration Processor (AAP). The CP version incorporates general purpose MIPS64 cores and hardware acceleration for networking. The AAP version adds hardware acceleration for security, regular expression, compression, RAID and de-duplication. The CN63XX will sample in Q4 2009 with prices ranging from $59 to $199 in 10K quantities.