Cavium Networks Announces Breakthrough Next Generation OCTEON II Multi-Core MIPS64 Internet Application Processor Family With 1 to 32 Cores

• New OCTEON II Delivers up to 4x Performance Over Market-Leading OCTEON Plus for Networking, Storage, Wireless and Control Applications
• Massively Integrated OCTEON II SOC Incorporates 1 to 32 Cores and up to 75 Next Generation Application Acceleration Engines, Virtualization and Power Optimizer Features to Deliver Industry-Leading Performance per Watt and Performance per Dollar

-- Cavium Networks (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, storage, wireless and video applications, today announced the OCTEON II Internet Application Processor (IAP) family of multi-core MIPS64® processors. The OCTEON II IAP offers up to 4x performance over the existing and widely deployed OCTEON Plus processor family, with more than twice the performance/watt and performance/dollar. In addition, the new product family adds revolutionary new application acceleration engines. The new OCTEON II IAP processor family is designed to fuel the voice, video and data convergence driven by cloud computing, virtualization, HD video over IP, Web 2.0 and mobile 3G/4G applications which require a many fold increase in packet processing, secure application delivery and quality of service (QoS) performance.

Over the past 2 years, general-purpose multi-core processors have become mainstream in embedded, networking, wireless, storage and high-bandwidth broadband applications. All major Tier-1 OEMs in the market have adopted multi-core processors and ported millions of lines-of-code of software, including proprietary operating systems, to achieve unprecedented gains in performance, power and cost savings. Multi-core designs span from fiber-to-the-home CPE (customer premise equipment) routers, 802.11n Wifi access points, and SME (small medium enterprise) routers to data center application delivery switches, service provider wireless gateways and core routers.

Cavium Networks OCTEON Multi-core MIPS64 processors have been a driving force for multi-core adoption at major Tier-1 networking, wireless, and storage OEMs worldwide. Cavium has dramatically simplified multi-core development by providing support for standard operating systems, GNU tool-chains, C/C++ based software applications and unique hardware acceleration engines with an advanced multi-core scheduler. Additionally Cavium's 100+ PACE™ ecosystem partners have delivered optimized OCTEON multi-core solutions across operating systems, development tools, applications, middleware and hardware platforms.

OCTEON II Internet Application Processor Family

The OCTEON II IAP family delivers a significant leap forward by offering up to 4x the performance, scalability, power and cost savings over the existing highest performance OCTEON Plus, in a software compatible manner. The OCTEON II IAP family integrates 1 to 32 custom cnMIPS64 cores, up to 75 Application Acceleration Engines for QoS, packet processing, TCP, compression, encryption, RAID, de-duplication and regular expression and a flexible set of networking I/Os including gigabit Ethernet, 10 gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express Gen 2, USB2.0, serial Rapid I/O (sRIO) and Interlaken. Additionally OCTEON II features a revolutionary new Hyperconnect™ crossbar with low-latency and virtualization features, up to 400Gbps of DDR3 memory bandwidth, up to 100Gbps of network connectivity. Using an on-chip Power Optimizer the OCTEON II family consumes only 2W to 60W across the entire family. The OCTEON II Software Development Kit (SDK) builds upon the existing OCTEON SDK and includes Linux SMP, GNU Toolchain, Simple Executive for fast path applications, performance tools, simulator, feature rich APIs for hardware acceleration and an extensive set of examples. To accelerate customer development Cavium also offers production ready software toolkits and multi-core software architecture and design consulting services.

"Cavium has done more than simply combine a bunch of high-performance cores," notes Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. "The OCTEON II architecture is carefully balanced in the number of cores, frequency, hardware acceleration, multicore scheduling, internal interconnects, memory bandwidth and interfaces to provide a scalable and optimized solution that is necessary for its target applications."

"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," said Ken Klein, President and CEO of Wind River. "Cavium's OCTEON II family sets a new standard in performance and integration. Working closely together, we are providing the software foundation for customer applications to easily harness the full power of OCTEON II's 32 cores."

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.

"Cavium has maintained a breakneck pace of innovation by introducing a new market leading product family every two years since 2001," said Syed Ali, President and CEO at Cavium Networks. "Each successive generation of Cavium products enabled the rapid growth of new markets including enterprise security, data center application delivery, intelligent routing, enterprise wireless and high bandwidth broadband. OCTEON II will fuel the growth of emerging hyper-network applications such as cloud computing, data center virtualization, smart storage, 4G/LTE wireless, HD video over the Internet and multimedia rich Web 2.0 applications."

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.

About Cavium Networks

Cavium Networks is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in networking, communications, storage and security applications. Cavium Networks offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software-compatible processors ranging in performance from 10 Mbps to 20 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access and service provider equipment. Cavium Networks processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium Networks principal offices are in Mountain View, CA with design team locations in California, Massachusetts and India. For more information, please visit: http://www.caviumnetworks.com.