PHYSICS

Cavium announced that its flagship 32 Core OCTEON II MIPS64 CN6880 processor had achieved a score of over 150,000 on the industry standard Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) benchmark in a single chip. This new world leading CoreMark Score of 153,477 is unmatched by any other general purpose communication processor chip with an integrated high performance I/O subsystem capable of delivering over 40Gbps feature-rich, networking application throughput.

The CoreMark benchmark isolates the CPU's core performance from memory and I/O effects and is able to measure meaningful information about a processor's core performance and includes tests of basic pipeline structure, read/write operations, integer operations, control operations including multiply-accumulate (MAC) and single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instructions, list processing, string search, matrix array multiplication and state-machine processing. Tests are based on information not available at compile time and provides for a more realistic real-world performance metric for embedded processors than some older benchmarks. Higher CoreMark scores allow Cavium OCTEON II processors to address new markets including higher-end control plane, and integrated control and data plane applications that require high single-threaded software performance and has been widely designed into a wide range of flagship products including routers, switches, 3G/4G base-stations, services cards, security gateways and appliances, storage networking and mobile core infrastructure equipment.

The OCTEON II family incorporates Cavium's custom cnMIPS cores and utilizes an innovative high-performance cross-bar for access to a unified L2 cache, which benefits high performance multi-threaded applications, resulting in substantially lower latency for packet processing. Cavium OCTEON II's performance is also greatly aided by its real cores with dedicated L1 caches and higher cache set associativity as demonstrated by greater cache effectiveness and superior deterministic, low-latency performance.

Cavium's flagship OCTEON II CN6880 processor provides up to 48GHz of industry-leading 64 bit compute power across 32 cores, and provides seamless software compatibility with the full range of OCTEON II processors. Furthermore, OCTEON II processors provide this performance within highly constrained power envelopes providing industry-leading performance per watt. As a result, OCTEON II is becoming the leading choice at multiple Tier 1 OEM customers worldwide.

"The work that EEMBC has done with their industry-standard CoreMark benchmark is helping OEMs objectively compare different processors and the claims of various vendors," said YJ Kim, General Manager, Infrastructure Processor Group, Cavium. "Cavium is pleased to be not only leading the pack in single chip performance for the integrated communications processor space, but also showing significantly better results than other benchmarked high-end communication processors."

OCTEON II CN6880 marks several breakthrough milestones for standards-based multi-core computing technology. Tier-1 customer boards populated with the OCTEON II family are enabling game changing, innovative architectures for next generation networking platforms.