Cavium unveils new Octeon III processor family

The 2.5GHz Octeon III processors provide the most compute power of any standards-based communications processor chip, at an unmatched 120GHz of 64-bit compute processing per chip. Octeon III delivers up to 4X higher application performance than the Octeon II with significantly superior performance per watt. Furthermore, Octeon III is the industry's first SoC to integrate best-in-class high-performance search processing leveraged from Cavium's Neuron Search processors along with market-leading 5th generation DPI Acceleration, dramatically reducing BOM cost and power. Providers of Next-Generation Networks are being challenged to handle the explosive increase in traffic because of the fast adoption of cloud technology and mobile broadband, as well as increased exchange of multimedia and video rich content. Higher traffic coupled with the need for intelligent application-aware and secure processing has shifted the bottleneck for L3 - L7 data and security services to CPU processing that requires an unprecedented level of 64-bit CPU GHz processing power and dedicated hardware acceleration. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), by the end of 2015, annual global IP traffic will increase four-fold from 2010, reaching 966 Exabytes per year and mobile traffic will increase 26-fold. Additionally, "The Internet of Things or Devices" is growing rapidly. According to GSMA, the global mobile industry trade group, and other analysts, the number of internet connected devices will increase from 9 billion in 2011 to over 20 billion by 2020, and could potentially reach 50 billion, accelerating the migration to IPv6 and generating massive amounts of data traffic. "Cavium is the fastest growing embedded multi-core processor company, and Cavium's flagship Octeon II 32-core processor was selected for the Linley Group Analyst's Choice award as Best Embedded Processor of 2011," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group and editor-in-chief of the Microprocessor Report. "With Octeon III, Cavium has made impressive advances in performance, process technology, unique search-processing acceleration and multi-chip scalability. The new processor should provide customers with leading-edge application performance, superior integration and attractive low power for next-generation systems." "Cavium's proven track record in delivering industry leading multi-core processors and superior software solutions across three generations has enabled us to achieve a wide customer following. With the new Octeon III family we are leapfrogging both ourselves and our competition in scalability, performance and integration, while maintaining full backward compatibility with previous Octeon processors," said Syed Ali, President and CEO at Cavium. "Octeon III will enable customers to build highly differentiated systems at performance levels that were simply not possible previously."