At this week’s Computex Taipei Cavium continues to drive the adoption and deployment of the MIPS 64 architecture with the announcement of new vendors and markets for the well-established RISC technology. The Octeon III CN7XXX multi-core MIPS64 CPUs operate at up to 120GHz with up to 48 cores, supporting comprehensive hardware virtualization, features that are in demand in SDN and NFV driven data centers.

octeon
octeon

The high performance, low power processors are well suited to networking designs as shown by announcements from ZyXel and Xirrus at Computex. ZyXel is using the Octeon III across its entire product line; high-end retail, SMB and entry-level enterprise platforms for networking, security, storage and control plane applications. The Cavium CPUs will be found in their next-generation UTM gateways and 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches.

Xirrus, meanwhile, announced that the Octeon III will be used in its next-generation 802.11ac Wave 2 high-density, high-performance single and multi-radio wireless platforms. Dense use environments, such as schools, hotels, and wireless heavy businesses require access points with significant intelligence to properly manage the communications infrastructure. Security is also an important concern that needs the performance and power of the Octeon solution along with its reduced power requirements.

Cavium also announced this week an expanded role for the Octeon processors using standard computer-on-module form factors to aid in expanding use of the processors into military, industrial and aerospace applications. Three form factors are being offered including COM Express Compact (95mm x 95mm), COM Express Mini (84mm x 55mm), and Qseven (70mm x 70mm). Depending on the module there is support for up to 8GB of DDR3 memeory, eight USB 2.0 ports, 4 USB 3.0 parts, multiple PCI Express 2.0 lanes, and two SATA 6 Gbp/s interfaces. All modules use the Octeon III CN7130 with four 64-bit MIPS CPU cores, hardware accelerated packet processing, security, and deep packet inspection engines and support the Cavium Octeon SDK and Monte Vista carrier grade Linux