Cavium introduces two chip lines

CAVIUM, A COMPANY you probably have never heard of, just put out two new lines of chips that are going into things you probably will end up using. The new chips, in the Octeon CN31xx and CN30xx lines, are aimed at networking, storage, and general moving bits around work, and fill in the middle and low end of the Cavium product line.

They make two main product lines, Octeon and Nitrox, each come in a variety of flavors. Nitrox is the security line, with Nitrox, Nitrox II, Nitrox lite and Nitrox Soho parts. The II is a standalone CPU, the non-suffixed and the lite are co-processors, and Soho is the one you probably use on a fairly regular basis. A lot of home/soho firewalls and routers use them, so chances are, you either use or own one.

The Octeon line is the one we are going to focus on today, it is a routing chip made up of latest MIPS64 R2 cores along with other additions in a modular fashion. The releases today, CN31xx is a family of 6 parts with single and dual core variants, the CN30xx is single core only and has 4 variants. The 30xx has various features removed to lower the cost.

Rather than look at this from a 'wow, they are dual core too' perspective, you might want to reconsider that bit about the filling the low end of their line. The Octeon family up until these launches went no lower than 4 cores, with the high end parts topping out at 16 cores. 2 is a curiously low number from this perspective, and one, well, give that to the intern as a side project.

So, what do they do? Move bits around really fast, encrypt and decrypt, and just about anything else you want to program them to do. The new parts are aimed at so called Triple Play boxes, voice, video and data transfer that is so much the rage all of a sudden. It seems the world has finally figured out that telephone calls and video are just more data, and everyone want on. They all want to do it securely too, after all, the NSA really is trying to snoop on your phone calls to Aunt Millie to steal the jealously gaurded family recipe for oatmeal avocado cookies. This puts Cavium in a nice spot indeed.

The CN31xx has 1-2 cores, runs at up to 550MHz, has 3 GBE ports, USB 2.0 interfaces and uses DDR2 memory. It sports TCP/IP and packet acceleration, compression support for several ZIP variants, and a bunch of optional pattern matching engines. In addition, it can also do up to 2GBps of encrypted traffic using DES, 3DES, AES/256, RSA, Diffie-Hellman and a bunch of hashes. If that isn't enough, they have a ton of primitives available to roll your own. Basically, they can sling a lot of data around to and fro, securely.

Look for the CN31xx to start showing up in boxes during Q1, the CN30xx in Q2. Costs will start out at under $20, $19 to be exact, and run all the way to $125 for a fully loaded CN31xx. That said, don't really look for them, chances are, you will never see one unless you take a screwdriver to your Watchguard or a hammer to your Netgear. This may at times be quite cathartic, but we can not recommend it in practice. µ