MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., November 15, 2010 –Cavium Networks (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, and the digital home, today set new standards for performance per dollar and performance per watt across every major performance point from 100Mbps to 40Gbps by extending its family of OCTEON II processors with four new processor lines. The new OCTEON II processor families, CN60XX, CN61XX, CN62XX, and CN66XX, integrate one to ten cnMIPS64 cores expanding both low and mid range options in a fully software compatible manner with other members of the OCTEON II and OCTEON Plus family enabling seamless re-use. With this addition, the OCTEON II family delivers 0.4 GHz to 48GHz of 64 bit compute power in a single chip with up to 32 general-purpose MIPS cores along with the most advanced networking, security and storage hardware accelerators. OCTEON II processors also feature four new, unique technologies to achieve lower power, deep packet inspection, virtualization and anti-counterfeiting which enable highly differentiated capabilities in OEM equipment. The OCTEON product line is the industry’s #1 embedded multi-core processor line designed into enterprise, data center and service provider equipment including routers, switches, appliances, 3G/4G wireless base stations, RNCs, xGSNs, evolved packet core, services gateways, DPI equipment, storage switches and intelligent server adapters.

Several factors are driving increased market adoption of highly integrated, higher performance per watt OCTEON II multi-core solutions. The proliferation of smart phones and ever increasing traffic enabled by internet connection speeds are driving the need for higher performing wireless 3G/4G base stations and telecommunications infrastructure equipment. Additionally with an increasing set of Web 2.0 applications along with various types of access devices and locations, network equipment devices are integrating sophisticated security and deep-packet-inspection features. Furthermore, there is continued pressure to maintain or reduce power consumption while increasing services, availability and reliability.

"With this announcement Cavium has dramatically expanded its OCTEON II product line, providing the widest possible choice to OEM customers," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. "Cavium's approach of combining many high-performance physical cores allows it to more easily scale cost, power, and performance to meet the diverse needs of its many Tier 1 customers."

“Close Tier 1 customer engagements have led to this expansion of OCTEON II family which features several compelling innovations and significantly increases our competitive position,” said Rajiv Khemani, Vice President and General Manager of Networking and Communications, Cavium Networks.  “With these OCTEON II processors, we have also increased our addressable applications to include considerably higher usage in control plane, wireless, security equipment and intelligent adapters.”

OCTEON II Family Highlights
The OCTEON II family combines multiple cnMIPS64 R2 cores along with L2-L7 application and security acceleration engines, virtualization features and 100Mbps - 100Gbps of connectivity. The custom designed cnMIPS™ cores implement an enhanced MIPS64 R2 instruction-set and have been architected to deliver superior performance per area along with dedicated compute and cache resources essential for deterministic, low-latency performance.

The newly introduced OCTEON II processors and target applications include:

1) CN60XX (1 - 2 Cores): WLAN Access points (AP), Entry-level VPN/UTM/Firewalls, Low-cost Control Plane applications, Satellite and Broadband Gateways.

2) CN61XX and CN62XX (2 – 4 Cores): Enterprise Switches & Routers with Integrated Data and Control, High-performance Control Plane, UTM & Security Appliances, Printers, Small to Medium Business (SMB) and Low to Mid-range Enterprise class NAS/iSCSI appliances.

3) CN66XX (6 – 10 cores): WAN Optimization, Enterprise, Data Center and Storage applications requiring 2x10GbE performance and connectivity and High-performance 3G/4G Base Stations.