Cavium unveils OCTEON TX: range of 64-bit ARM-based SOCs

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.

Feature Highlights

• Enhanced ThunderX (TX) ARM64 bit cores based on the latest ARM v8.1 ISA, with up to 2.2 GHz core frequency and 78K of I-Cache and 32K of D-Cache
• CN80XX, CN81XX: From 1 to 4 cores, up to 2MB of Last Level Cache, 1x32b/64b DDR4 with ECC.
• CN82XX, CN83XX: From 8 to 24 cores, up to 8MB of Last Level Cache, up to 2x64b DDR4 with ECC
• Simultaneous support of bulk and RSA crypto, from 400Mbps to 40Gbps of IPSEC performance and 600 to 20K RSA Ops/sec for 2048 bit keys.
• Latest security features – Supports a wide variety of protocols including IPsec, SSL, TLS 1.x, DTLS and ECC Suite B. Also supports a wide variety of algorithms including several variants of AES, 3DES, SHA-2, SHA-3, RSA 2048, RSA 4096, RSA 8192, ECC p256/p384/p521, Kasumi, ZUC and SNOW 3G.
• From 500Mbps to 50Gbps of Layer 3 forwarding
• Up to 2x 32/64-bit DDR3/DDR4 controllers with ECC, with up to 2400MTS
• Integrated Compression Engines with up to 40Gbps
• High bandwidth IO: Integrates up to - 12 10Gb/1GbE, 3 40GbE, 4 PCI-Express Gen3, 6 SATA 3.0
• Latest ARMv8.1 and SMMU v2 for data center class full-SOC virtualization support
• Low Power to meet the strict thermal profiles of fanless designs, off-load cards and outdoor industrial grade form factors