Cavium announces higher performance 1.8GHz per-core OCTEON II CN63XX processor family

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Cavium Networks, a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, and the digital home, announced that it has delivered its OCTEON II CN63XX 2 to 6-core MIPS64 processors, with up to 10.8GHz of 64 bit processing with each CPU core running at up to 1.8GHz, to customers worldwide.

This new 1.8GHz operating frequency more than doubles the CPU core frequency available relative to the previous generation of OCTEON Plus processors, providing customers a huge performance boost along with R&D investment re-use. The performance upgrade also enhances Cavium's competitive position in the embedded processor market segment.

Higher per-core frequency allows Cavium to address new markets including higher-end control plane, and integrated control and data plane applications that require high single-threaded software performance. Coupled with the broad shipment of Cavium's flagship OCTEON II CN6880 processor, which provides up to 48GHz of industry-leading 64 bit compute power across 32 cores, the availability of OCTEON II CN63XX production silicon is accelerating OEM designs to market for a variety of applications from the low-end to the high-end with seamless software compatibility and multi-chip scalability.

As a result, the OCTEON II processor family is now a leading choice at multiple Tier 1 OEM customers worldwide and has been widely designed into their flagship products across routers, switches, 3G/4G base-stations, services cards, security gateways and appliances, storage networking and mobile infrastructure equipment.

"The OCTEON II family represents many years of constant innovation and refinement in our multi-core architecture, technology and design methodology, industry-proven through hundreds of customer designs and engagements," said Anil Jain, corporate VP of IC Engineering at Cavium Networks. "We are pleased to be able to offer not only the highest overall SoC application performance but also leading single-core frequency delivering a compelling solution for an even broader range of customers."

With 2 to 6 custom-designed MIPS64 cores running at up to 1.8GHz per core, a 2MB shared L2 cache, DDR3 controller, integrated XAUI, GbE, sRIO and PCIe Gen2 I/O's, and the industry's most comprehensive hardware acceleration for encryption/decryption, Deep Packet Inspection, packet processing and compression/decompression, the CN63XX family offers a compelling processing platform with leading performance per dollar and performance per watt.