Networking chipmaker Cavium Networks has extended its family of Octeon II processors with four new processor lines. The Octeon II processor families, CN60XX, CN61XX, CN62XX, and CN66XX, integrate one to ten cnMIPS64 cores expanding both low and mid range options in a software compatible manner with other members of the Octeon II and Octeon Plus family enabling re-use. With this addition, the Octeon II family delivers 0.4 GHz to 48GHz of 64 bit compute power in a single chip with up to 32 general-purpose MIPS cores along with the advanced networking, security and storage hardware accelerators. Octeon II processors feature four technologies such as Power Optimiser that adjusts power in real time depending upon the application-level processing requirement without the need to adjust CPU voltage or clock frequency and Hyper Finite Automata (HFA) that provides Deep Packet Inspection service by combining both DFA and NFA architectures into one cohesive service. The other two technologies are EmVisor that provides hardware support for a complete SoC virtualisation and Authentik that allows the whole multi-core processing chip to be locked in OEM equipment. The Octeon product line is an embedded multi-core processor line designed into enterprise, data centre and service provider equipment including routers, switches, appliances, 3G/4G wireless base stations, RNCs, xGSNs, evolved packet core, services gateways, DPI equipment, storage switches and intelligent server adapters.
The Octeon II family combines multiple cnMIPS64 R2 cores along with L2-L7 application and security acceleration engines, virtualisation features and 100Mbps-100Gbps of connectivity. The Octeon II processors and target applications include CN60XX (1 - 2 Cores) which includes WLAN Access points (AP), entry-level VPN/UTM/Firewalls, low-cost control plane applications, satellite and broadband gateways. It features CN61XX and CN62XX (2 - 4 Cores) that include enterprise switches and routers with integrated data and control, control plane, UTM and security appliances, printers, small to medium business and low to mid-range enterprise class NAS/iSCSI appliances. It also includes CN66XX (6 - 10 cores) that features WAN optimisation, enterprise, data centre and storage applications requiring 2x10GbE performance and connectivity and 3G/4G base stations. These processors incorporate a range of hardware accelerators including L2-L7 application and security acceleration engines, TCP offload, load balancing, compression and support for virtualisation. The product family supports a wide range of I/Os including XAUI, SGMII, RGMII, SRIO, PCIe Gen 2 and USB. The Octeon II product line is supported by the embedded multi-core ecosystem with over 50 partners providing operating systems and tools, software applications and stacks, debuggers, complementary silicon, ATCA and hardware appliances, hardware and software consulting, and other products and services. Various members of the CN6XXX processor family will be offered with different hardware acceleration options, speed grades and price points. The CN62XX is available for sampling and the complete design collateral for all of the processors is available for early access customers and the additional processors are expected to sample in Q2 2011.