Gigabit home routers arrive

CAVIUM MAY NOT have had a booth at Computex but the firm did have a meeting room next door with a bunch of interesting widgets on display. Two of them stood out as useful end user products, a NIC and a router.

If you don't know Cavium, it makes security and routing chips. Read this for more on its architecture. Architecture is fine, but products are quite another, and now we can show you that as well.

This is obviously the NIC, and unlike most NICs it has two SO-DIMMs on it and it plugs into a PCI-X slot. The CPU is an Octeon and it has four ethernet ports. This is not your average NIC. Basically it is a programmable NIC that will allow you to do almost any kind of packet twiddling at line rate, handy for things like security and packet sniffing.

The other part is something we want much more than the NIC, a high-end, home-based router. If you are like us and can kill any home router that comes into your grasp with a mere torrenting of 12 Ubuntu CDs at once, this looks like the toy for you.

It is GigE on all ports, both in and out, and actually looks to have the muscle to drive that much bandwidth without running out of CPU. While it is a currently shipping product, it is only available in Japan, so the rest of the world will have to do without.

It is good to see chips like this getting into real world, and more importantly, real world consumer level products. With bandwidth creeping up, agonizingly slowly if you live in the US, routers are not keeping pace. Hopefully parts like these will change all that. µ