Content matters in smart-network gear
By Maury Wright -- EDN, September 16, 2004
Increasingly, network-equipment vendors are adding support for upper layer applications that previously lived in servers or workstations. For instance, the equipment can handle security and content processing that are mapped to layers 3 to 7 of the network model. But traditional control- and data-plane processors concentrate on the packet headers that are key to moving data and lack the surplus horsepower necessary to inspect the content of data packets. Coprocessors offer one approach to the problem, but Cavium Networks has developed a family of NSP (network-services processors), which are multicore SOCs (systems on chips) that can handle both typical network processing tasks and content-centric applications.
The company’s new Octeon NSP family includes ICs with two to 16 MIPS64 cores, along with hardware accelerators for content and security processing, and on-chip coprocessors for Gigabit Ethernet, SPI-4.2 (System Packet Interface), and PCI-X interfaces. The chips target routers, switches, and network appliances with VPN (virtual-private-network), firewall, antivirus, and antispam requirements. The company claims that the NSP architecture delivers a fivefold boost in cost, power consumption, and performance relative to other current architectures. The ICs come in two-, four-, eight-, and 16-core models and range in price from $125 to $750 (10,000). Samples and evaluation boards will ship in the first quarter of 2005.
Cavium Networks, 1-408-844-8420, www.cavium.com.
