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May 22, 2005
More meat for the NPU fire
Haven't posted about NPUs for some time. I remain extremely bullish on my investment in IP Fabrics. Last week Raza Microelectronics finally "officially" unveiled their high end NPU which I had heard rumors for some time. No surprise that Warburg Pincus is behind it with Beau Vrolyk on the board. Beau an I have often bashed brains about the future of NPUs and what will happen with the hardware and software. Nice to be able to talk publicly about something I have known about for over a year. This is a good thing for the NPU market. After a year of major vendor pull-back from the NPU market and Intel taking all the marbles, it is good to have a new entrant.
Here is Linley's summary of the announcement:
===Raza Discloses Powerful Processor, EoS Chip
--------------------------------------------------
At Spring Processor Forum, stealth startup Raza Microelectronics (RMI) announced its much-anticipated multicore processor, known as the XLR. This powerful device contains eight MIPS64 processors operating at speeds up to 1.5GHz. Although it was announced only this week, the XLR has been sampling since December.
Like most network processors, the XLR uses multithreading to improve the efficiency of its scalar CPUs while processing many packets in parallel.
(David Hass, the XLR's architect, was formerly an architect at Nexsi, a failed NPU startup also funded by Raza.) Each XLR CPU switches among four threads, for a total of 32 threads on the chip. The XLR is the only commercially available MIPS processor to implement multithreading.
Along with its high-speed CPUs, the XLR contains 2MB of cache memory and a crypto engine capable of 10Gbps of AES, 3DES, SHA-1, or MD5 encryption. It supports 12.8GB/s of peak bandwidth to DDR2 SDRAM or RLDRAM. The processor connects to the rest of the system through two integrated 10GbE MACs or four integrated GbE MACs as well as other high-speed interfaces. RMI quotes a list price of $850 for the high-end XLR but offers lower-cost versions with fewer CPUs and other restricted capabilities.
The company positions the XLR for a wide range of control-plane and data-plane applications. The chip is well suited for high-end control-plane designs; compared with Broadcom's BCM1480, the XLR offers more CPUs, more clock speed, and multithreading for a lower price. We do not, however, expect the XLR to displace traditional NPUs from Layer 3/4 routing applications, due to the XLR's greater cost and power dissipation and incomplete software solution. Instead, we see the XLR competing with Cavium's Octeon in data-plane applications that require greater per-packet processing, such as security (intrusion prevention/antivirus), IP storage, and web switching. Octeon lacks the XLR's multithreading capability but offers a hard-wired DFA engine, useful in many security applications.
At the same time, RMI also introduced its Orion chip, designed to provide packet service over the Sonet/SDH network. The Orion family includes products for OC-3, OC-12, or OC-48 Sonet rates and 8 FE ports, 2 GbE ports, or 3 T3/E3 packet ports. The Orion architecture consists of a Sonet/SDH mapper and an Ethernet interface. The mapper includes a Sonet/SDH framer, pointer processor, VCAT (virtual concatenation), LCAS, and GFP framer. The Ethernet interface includes MACs, MAC forwarding, and a traffic manager for 2K flows. The chip may be used for Ethernet over Sonet (EoS) or to switch Ethernet traffic.
Although vendors such as PMC-Sierra and TranSwitch have been shipping data-mapping products for similar applications, RMI offers a highly integrated chip with sophisticated traffic-management capabilities that include dual-bucket policing, random early discard, and shaping. As a late entrant, RMI's challenge is to use Orion's unique features to establish a position in this nascent market. --LG/JB
Complete coverage of Cavium's Octeon and similar processors appears in our report "A Guide to High-Speed Embedded Processors."
http://www.linleygroup.com/Reports/ctlpln_guide.html
Posted by Martin at May 22, 2005 8:24 PM
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