Integrated semiconductor provider Cavium has introduced a new category of processors that are workload optimized for a range of applications in the cloud and data center.

Cavium claims its 2.5GHz 48 core ThunderX is the world’s highest performing low-power 64-bit ARMv8 SoC family of workload optimized processors with a range of SKUs and form factors for high performance, volume compute, storage, secure compute and networking specific workloads.

The ThunderX CN88XX processor portfolio consists of 24 to 48 cores and is the fifth generation of multi-core processor design from Cavium which will target high performance volume servers and appliances for large data centers and cloud infrastructure.

This family of processors offers workload optimized SKU’s targeted for compute, storage, networking and secure compute segments.

This portfolio of products is compliant with ARMv8 architecture as well as ARM’s Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) standard and will bring enhancements including:
• The first ARM based SoC that scales up to 48 cores with up to 2.5 GHz core frequency with 78K of I-Cache and 32K of D-Cache along with 16MB of L2 cache.

• The first ARM based SOC to be fully cache coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI)

• Integrated I/O capacity with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth

• Four DDR3/4 72 bit memory controllers capable of supporting 2400 MHz memories with 1TB of memory in a dual socket configuration

• Hundreds of integrated hardware accelerators for security, storage, networking and virtualization applications.

• Standard based low latency Ethernet fabric interconnecting thousands of ThunderX™ nodes in 2D and 3D configurations and enabling fabric monitoring and SLA enforcements with awareness and policy enforcement for virtualized networks.

• Virtualization everywhere with Cavium virtSOC technology – Full system virtualization for low latency from virtual machine to I/O.

• Best in class performance per watt and performance per dollar for the target applications

The ThunderX CN87xx family will consist of 8 to 16 cores in single socket configuration with two DDR3/4 controllers, multiple 10GbE, SATAv3 and PCIe third generation interfaces.

Cavium said the portfolio is cost and power optimized for entry level applications such as cold storage, distributed content delivery, dedicated hosting, distributed memory caching and embedded and control plane.

It also said it working directly with strategic commercial partners across the entire software ecosystems including Hadoop, Data Analytics, Web and Scale Out Storage.

The ThunderX family of processors along with a range of hardware reference platforms will be available for general sampling in early Q4 2014.