Infrastructure processors target wired and wireless networking equipment

Marvell has announced the OCTEON TX2, the latest family of infrastructure processors aimed at an extensive range of wired and wireless networking equipment including switches, secure gateways, firewall, routers, network monitoring, 5G base stations, and smart network interface controllers (NICs). Large increases in data traffic coupled with escalating demands for end-to-end security are intensifying the requirement for highly scalable compute platforms with integrated workload-optimised hardware accelerators to satisfy performance, power and total cost of ownership needs. Building on five generations of this scalable and widely adopted infrastructure processor platform, the family is enabled by a wide software ecosystem which includes a feature-rich SDK and virtualisation support, providing a unique combination of performance and programmability. The portfolio extends the company's performance and scalability, delivering a 2.5x improvement over the previous generation and scaling up to 200Gbps of packet processing throughput.

“Today’s data infrastructure requires significantly faster network throughput and higher end-to-end security at all nodes of the network,” said John Sakamoto, vice president of Infrastructure Processor Business Unit at Marvell. “Built on more than a decade of expertise, the OCTEON TX2 family extends Marvell’s performance leadership in supporting high-performance datapath and security applications with a 2.5x performance boost over previous generations.”

“High-performance data networks require increased compute performance and efficiency as we enter the 5G era,” said Mohamed Awad, vice president of marketing, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “OCTEON TX2, based on the Armv8-A architecture, enables new levels of performance to meet the demands of next-generation networking and cloud data centre applications.