6WIND and NetLogic expand collaboration to provide high-performance packet processing software for XLP832 multicore communications processor

Mobile World Congress 2011, SANTA CLARA, USA & PARIS, FRANCE: NetLogic Microsystems Inc. and 6WIND, the leading provider of commercial packet processing software solutions, announced an expansion of their collaboration to deliver high-performance solutions for next-generation telecom infrastructure, networking equipment and security appliances.

Building on the success of its 6WINDGate packet processing software for NetLogic Microsystems’ XLR and XLS processor families, 6WIND will introduce support for NetLogic Microsystems’ best-in-class XLP832 multi-core communications processor. 6WIND will discuss its support for NetLogic Microsystems’ platforms at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 14th to 17th (booth 2H10) and at the RSA Conference in San Francisco from February 14th to 18th.

The XLP832 processor is designed for next-generation networking applications such as security appliances, Layer 4 through Layer 7 switching, storage networking, 3G/4G wireless and small business networks that require extremely high levels of system performance. The 6WINDGate software suite uniquely complements the XLP832 processor, by delivering the high packet processing performance that is required in order for networking equipment to deliver advanced services running on these applications.

Designers of networking equipment for data center and cloud applications are increasingly developing next-generation systems that are capable of scaling to line rates of 160Gbps while providing support for intelligent networking, advanced security protocols and energy reduction. As the gold standard for commercial multi-core packet processing software, 6WINDGate delivers a 10x performance improvement, allowing OEMs to develop products that achieve the best cost-performance, integration and energy efficiency in the industry.

“We have enjoyed Tier One customer success from our collaboration with 6WIND on multiple generations of our products, and we are pleased to extend our relationship into our latest family of XLP multicore processors,” said Behrooz Abdi, executive vice president and general manager at NetLogic Microsystems. “By tightly coupling the industry-leading 6WINDGate software with our breakthrough XLP processors, we offer customers a major performance improvement over existing solutions.”

NetLogic Microsystems’ breakthrough XLP multi-core processor family is the first and only embedded communications processor that features quad-issue, quad-threaded and superscalar out-of-order capabilities with scalability to 128 NXCPUs operating at 2.0GHz.

Designed in TSMC’s advanced 40nm process, the XLP family of multi-core processors is optimized to deliver unparalleled data plane and control plane performance, as well as the ability to support billions of in-flight messages and packet descriptors. The XLP cores are quad-threaded to effectively minimize bottlenecks and memory latencies that are inherent in network data-plane processing applications, and are equipped with a tri-level cache architecture with over 50 Mbytes of fully coherent on-chip cache.

“We are pleased to partner with industry leader NetLogic Microsystems to optimize the performance of our software on the innovative XLP multicore processing platform,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “The XLP architecture incorporates a wide range of features that accelerate advanced networking functions. By fully exploiting these features within 6WINDGate, we are able to deliver a truly optimized hardware-plus-software solution for performance-critical networking applications.”

Providing a comprehensive, pre-integrated suite of networking protocols fully optimized for multi-core platforms, 6WINDGate eliminates the need for OEMs to invest their engineering resources into combining discrete protocols from multiple sources and/or designing custom optimizations to exploit the performance features of the processor they have selected.

This allows 6WIND’s customers to eliminate up to twelve months of development time, reaping the rewards of being early to market with cost-optimized products that typically achieve 10x the performance obtainable from a standard operating system stack.