Cavium Networks announced initial shipments of OCTEON(R) II CN66XX processors to multiple OEM customers. The Cavium OCTEON II CN66XX integrates up to 10 MIPS64 cores and most-advanced hardware acceleration for networking, mobile infrastructure, control-plane and data-center applications providing superior performance within highly constrained power and cost designs. As a result, the CN66XX processor has already been selected by 3 tier-1 mobile infrastructure equipment providers, the majority of tier-1 networking and security OEMs, as well as leading storage vendors. The CN66XX is pin and software compatible with Cavium's widely-adopted OCTEON II CN63XX processor with 1.67x performance increase, enabling increased scalability with seamless hardware and software re-use.

"Cavium's OCTEON II processor architecture based on physical 64-bit cores and faster caches provides higher overall CoreMark industry-standard benchmark compute performance along with lower latency and greater determinism for packet processing," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. "These important attributes make the CN66XX a compelling solution for a wide range of networking, security and mobile OEM customers."

"With the CN66XX, we now offer 2.5x the number of full 64-bit CPU cores and 2x the GHz versus alternatives within an extremely compact and power-efficient form-factor," said YJ Kim, General Manager of Cavium's Infrastructure Processor Group. "The full spectrum of Cavium's integrated third-generation hardware acceleration, including our superior and deterministic DPI processing, augments our leading CPU performance. We are pleased with the market adoption of the CN66XX which enables a variety of winning solutions in next generation mobile infrastructure, cloud and networking applications."

The Cavium OCTEON processor family is the industry's broadest and highest performance Multi-core MIPS64 processor family with price points that address application performance ranging from 1 Gbps to over 40 Gbps in a single chip. The OCTEON processor family consists of processors with 1 to 32 high-performance cores in a single chip with integrated networking interfaces and industry leading hardware acceleration for packet processing, quality of service, TCP, Security, compression / decompression and DPI. OCTEON Processors have been chosen by all major tier-1 OEMs for Router, Security, Mobile infrastructure equipment, Storage, Cloud Computing, Adapter and Control Plane applications.