Cavium and Freescale Announced 28nm embedded processors

Published:2012/2/8 23:53:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

Cavium and Freescale announced 28 nm embedded processors for data center appliances. The OpenFlow is an emerging technology supposed to replace today’s appliances with future networking applications. The OpenFlow standard for creating software-defined networks is still in its infancy. It’s not clear whether or not it will gain market traction.

OpenFlow is still being used in test beds, not production environments. Some of the standard’s features require processing and memory features not in today’s ASICs, and it’s not clear in the short term how OpenFlow will deliver on its promise of simpler, lower cost nets.

To get away from the existing protocols is not easy as they exist for a reason. It’s not clear where the OpenFlow solution will land, but there’s a lot of buzz about it.

OpenFlow ultimately aims to replace a variety of specialized data center systems and protocols with software applications. But in the foreseeable future those appliances such as firewalls, security and traffic management systems form a robust market that is attracting chip vendors such as Cavium, Freescale, LSI and the Netlogic division of Broadcom.

Cavium announced its Octeon III, a 2.5 GHz, 28 nm chip will come in versions with up to 48 MIPS64 cores, sampling late this year. The company claims it delivers four times the performance of its existing part used in a wide range of systems including routers, switches and wireless base stations.

Freescale announced two 28 nm additions to its QorIQ family. The T4240 and T4160 processors use up to 12 and 8 dual-threaded e6500 Power cores respectively, and both are set to sample this summer.

Both companies’ chips support a broad list of hardware accelerators for security and other functions including data compression. Both also support a broad suite of interfaces including PCI Express Gen 3.

Systems vendors said the move to 40 Gbit links on network switches has started. Some of largest data center companies have targeted 40G, and as a result the volumes have already picked up and the technology’s here to stay.

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