Marvell Announces OCTEON TX2 Family of Multi-Core Infrastructure Processors

[AleksandarK]

Marvell today announced OCTEON TX2, the latest family of infrastructure processors targeting a wide variety of wired and wireless networking equipment including switches, routers, secure gateways, firewall, network monitoring, 5G base stations, and smart network interface controllers (NICs). Massive increases in data traffic coupled with escalating requirements for end-to-end security are intensifying the need for highly scalable compute platforms with integrated workload-optimized hardware accelerators to meet performance, power and total cost of ownership requirements. Building on five generations of the industry's most scalable and widely adopted infrastructure processor platform, the OCTEON TX2 family is enabled by a broad software ecosystem including a feature-rich software development kit (SDK) and virtualization support, delivering a unique combination of performance and programmability. The OCTEON TX2 portfolio extends Marvell's industry-leading performance and scalability, delivering a 2.5x improvement over the previous generation and scaling up to 200 Gbps of packet processing throughput.



Marvell's OCTEON TX2 infrastructure processor family combines up to 36 cores, based on the Arm v8-A architecture with configurable and programmable hardware accelerator blocks, connected by Marvell's field-proven and highly scalable coherent interconnect. Compared to architectures that process data solely on CPU cores, these accelerator blocks - which include security, packet processing, and traffic management functions - are able to meet the most demanding performance and power requirements. The integrated hardware accelerators offer 2.5x improvement over Marvell's previous generation of OCTEON processors with scalable throughput ranging from 10 Gbps to over 200 Gbps making them ideal for 5G base station and transport network infrastructure, security, cloud and data center, enterprise networking, and intelligent offload applications.

The OCTEON platform is enabled by a mature and widely deployed SDK, supported by robust software ecosystems consisting of both open source and commercial offerings. The platform includes firmware, Linux OS and multiple distributions, virtualization, containers, data plane development kit (DPDK), protocol stacks, infrastructure management and orchestration like OpenStack and Kubernetes, and virtual network functions (VNFs). In addition, Marvell supports a full routing stack including TCP, SSL, and IPSEC support and DPDK support for L2/L3 forwarding and IPSEC.

"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 center applications."

Marvell's CN91xx, CN92xx, CN96xx, and CN98xx processor families include:

• 4 - 36 cores based on the Armv8-A architecture ranging up to 2.4 GHz frequency
• Rich I/O with 25G SerDes-based I/O interfaces, e.g. 100GbE, 50GbE, 40GbE, 25GbE, 10GbE, 2.5GbE, 1GbE Ethernet ports and PCIe gen4 interfaces supporting root-complex and end-point configurations
• Enhanced NITROX V security co-processors which accelerate a comprehensive set of asymmetric and symmetric cryptographic operations
• Hardware accelerators support with comprehensive packet processing hardware offload, including packet receive, flexible packet parsing, flow classification, buffer management, QoS (quality of service), transmit processing and hierarchical traffic shaping and scheduling
• Innovative and unique load-balancing and work scheduling hardware which accounts for QoS, packet ordering and synchronization

Marvell's OCTEON TX2 CN9130, CN92xx and CN96xx are available now with reference designs and development kits. Marvell's CN98xx will begin sampling in the second quarter of 2020.

For more information, please visit:

https://www.marvell.com/products/infrastructure-processors/multi-core-processors/octeon-tx2/octeon-tx2-cn9130.html

https://www.marvell.com/products/infrastructure-processors/multi-core-processors/octeon-tx2/octeon-tx2-cn92xx-cn96xx-cn98xx.html

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[FreedomEclipse]

Yay. Now Synology have something to upgrade their NASs with

 

[TheLostSwede]

Yay. Now Synology have something to upgrade their NASs with

Wrong market...
This is for 5G base stations and high-end switching infrastructure.

 

[fynxer]

Well we need something new and powerful in high end home routers.

We need REAL hardware accelerated encryption so we can run VPN gateway at 400-500 Mbit.

Getting real tired of router manufacturers releasing so called super high end router with negligible VPN encryption performance.

Finally they will soon release INVIZIBOX 2 PRO, this will be a kick in the balls to all home router manufacturers peddling expensive crap routers with bad encryption performance.

https://www.invizbox.com/products/invizbox-2-pro/

 

[TheLostSwede]

Well we need something new and powerful in high end home routers.

We need REAL hardware accelerated encryption so we can run VPN gateway at 400-500 Mbit.

Getting real tired of router manufacturers releasing so called super high end router with negligible VPN encryption performance.

Finally they will soon release INVIZIBOX 2 PRO, this will be a kick in the balls to all home router manufacturers peddling expensive crap routers with bad encryption performance.

https://www.invizbox.com/products/invizbox-2-pro/

Nah man, we need to switch to modern software on routers. Linux 5.6 and later with WireGuard which allows for wire speed VPN connections.

 

[trparky]

Nah man, we need to switch to modern software on routers. Linux 5.6 and later with WireGuard which allows for wire speed VPN connections.

Good luck with that. Many home router devices are running older versions of Linux kernels so as to allow their binary-only BLOB drivers to interface with the kernel. Any and all security patches to the Linux kernel are backported to the older version of the Linux kernel that these devices still use all while hoping to God that it doesn't break shit in the process.

Why is that? It comes back to the idea that every time the traffic light turns red, those in the Linux kernel dev team is changing stuff for the sake of changing stuff. APIs, function names, etc. which of course breaks binary-only BLOB drivers like that of Broadcom and other such drivers that are required for these devices to work. The Linux kernel community's answer, of course, is to open source the driver and put the driver in the upstream kernel code but if you're a multi-million dollar company that's plowed a whole lot of money into research and development of new hardware you're definitely not going to do that, that would be like McDonalds giving away their secret sauce that goes on the Big Mac; you'd be stupid to do that.

What the Linux kernel desperately needs is an ABI or Application Binary Interface where binary-only BLOB drivers can have a standard, safe, and stable set of APIs that would allow the drivers to interface into the kernel with relative security that these APIs won't change or break next week. Unfortunately, those in the open source world see this as heretical and thus well... we'll always have this kind of crap happening.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Good luck with that. Many home router devices are running older versions of Linux kernels so as to allow their binary-only BLOB drivers to interface with the kernel. Any and all security patches to the Linux kernel are backported to the older version of the Linux kernel that these devices still use all while hoping to God that it doesn't break shit in the process.

Why is that? It comes back to the idea that every time the traffic light turns red, those in the Linux kernel dev team is changing stuff for the sake of changing stuff. APIs, function names, etc. which of course breaks binary-only BLOB drivers like that of Broadcom and other such drivers that are required for these devices to work. The Linux kernel community's answer, of course, is to open source the driver and put the driver in the upstream kernel code but if you're a multi-million dollar company that's plowed a whole lot of money into research and development of new hardware you're definitely not going to do that, that would be like McDonalds giving away their secret sauce that goes on the Big Mac; you'd be stupid to do that.

What the Linux kernel desperately needs is an ABI or Application Binary Interface where binary-only BLOB drivers can have a standard, safe, and stable set of APIs that would allow the drivers to interface into the kernel with relative security that these APIs won't change or break next week. Unfortunately, those in the open source world see this as heretical and thus well... we'll always have this kind of crap happening.

I'm well aware, my comment was in response to the fact that we don't need faster hardware to get good VPN performance, instead, we need different software.
In fact, Linux kernel 2.69.x was quite common in routers up to a few years ago. At least most are on 3.4 or later now...
It's really quite laughable that all the chip makers are so crap when it comes to delivering up to date software to go with their chips.

I actually worked for a router manufacturer for about 2.5 years, so I have a very good understanding how the business works.

The ABI sounds like a great idea, as would a more modular kernel/driver model be, but I guess it would require too much work to re-write the code so it works that way.
I find the fact that there are time when you have to compile a new kernel to get drivers working being rather insane, as it's not user friendly at all. Had quite a few issues with my Aquantia card in my NAS before I got it going. After that it has been reasonably straight forward to install drivers though.

Sometimes the open source guys just need a kick in the ass, as they're too hellbent on their point of view, whereas Linux is a commercial product these days, regardless of what they want to dream about.
On the other hand, a lot of the binary blob driver guys are being silly, yes, I'm sure there are parts that are worth protecting, but at the same time, after a few years, just open source the drivers. In fact, this should be a legal requirement, as it would lead to less electronic waste if people could re-purpose old hardware.