Cavium, Inc. has unveiled OCTEON TX, a complete line of 64-bit ARM based SOCs for control plane and data plane applications in networking, security, and storage. This new product line is composed of 4 product families – CN80XX, CN81XX, CN82XX and CN83XX with 1 to 24 full custom, enhanced 64-bit ARM v8.1 cores, providing the industry’s broadest range of highly integrated 64-bit ARM SOC products for a wide variety of embedded processing applications. The OCTEON TX expands the addressability of Cavium’s embedded products into control plane application areas within enterprise, service provider, data center networking and storage that need support of extensive software ecosystem and virtualization features. This product line is also optimized to run multiple concurrent data and control planes simultaneously for security and router appliances, NFV and SDN infrastructure, service provider CPE, wireless transport, NAS, storage controllers, IOT gateways, printer and industrial applications.
Market Dynamics
The networks of the future are striving to become more open and application centric to enable service expansion and increase monetization. In this open network, the control plane needs to run commercial software distributions and operating systems (e.g., RHEL, Canonical and Java SE), support open source applications (e.g., OpenStack, OpenFlow and Quagga), launch services dynamically and run customer specific services. The data plane is also challenged to support concurrent coexistence of multiple types of high performance data plane applications for firewall, content delivery, routing, and traffic management. The bandwidth demanded for these data planes in networks is also exploding driven by multimedia 4K content and applications, exabytes of storage mirrored across Cloud and Enterprise, real time data acquisition, and rapid growth of connected devices in the IOT world. The threats inside these open networks of cloud and enterprise are becoming increasingly sophisticated and vulnerabilities are becoming more exposed with the connectivity of millions of unsecured IOT devices.
The OCTEON SOC architecture already has established market leadership in data plane application performance and efficiency. While current OCTEON SOCs are used in applications for data plane as well as control plane with embedded software, control plane applications requiring wider software ecosystem and support traditionally have been addressed by the x86 architecture. The open, service centric networks need lower-cost alternatives for control plane, and superior ecosystem and networking performance for data plane. The ARM architecture is able to service these critical needs.
The OCTEON TX ARM 64-bit SOC family of processors combine the best in class data plane performance of the OCTEON SOC family, and the rich software ecosystem and virtualization features, extended support of open source applications and highly optimized custom ARMv8.1 CPU cores of the ThunderX family. It also integrates Cavium’s flagship security architecture from the NITROX V security processor family. With this unique combination of performance, features and interfaces, the OCTEON TX provides an excellent solution for service centric networks and addresses additional application areas in the embedded processor market. The OCTEON TX offers a software compatible, scalable product family to meet the wide range of price, power and performance requirements of various end markets such as virtual CPE, wireless transport, NAS, storage appliances and controllers, IOT gateways, industrial control, SMB routers, security appliances, data center accelerators, data center appliances and various control plane applications.
Cavium
cavium.com
