Kontron to design with Cavium Networks OCTEON™ II multicore MIPS64 processor

OCTEON™ II processors to form the basis of Kontron’s next generation AdvancedMC™ intelligent I/O modules for packet processing applications

Poway, CA/Eching, Germany - April 14, 2009 - Kontron today announced its intentions to design with the OCTEON™ II processors from Cavium Networks (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, storage, wireless, video and security applications.

As a Cavium PACE (Partnership to Accelerate Customer End-solutions) member, Kontron will leverage the success of its AM42xx series of AdvancedMC™ Intelligent I/O modules that are designed with OCTEON™ Plus multi-core processors, and introduce its next generation modules using the OCTEON™ II processor family. Clients will be able to upgrade their systems with the highest packet processor performance, unprecedented scalability, and newly added virtualization functionalities, to support their multiple network infrastructure equipment such as media gateway- and wireless base station-type applications.

As market demand increases for higher bandwidth requirements from 10GbE to 40GbE - primarily with AdvancedTCA® - more components will be required to do higher processing beyond 10GbE. These types of multicore processing units will provide much more flexibility in xTCA platforms and create a broader range of target applications using COTS components in the network. Multiple 10GbE I/O capability combined with DDR3 memory bandwidth will enable system designs for LTE and other core network elements. sRIO is supported in the OCTEON™ II CN63XX; hence this type of architecture will also enable the usage in combination with other DSP-intensive applications in MicroTCA™ platforms.

“Our clients depend on us to continually offer highly competitive packet processor AMC modules at interesting pricepoints,” said Marc Leclaire, Kontron AdvancedTCA®-AdvancedMC™ product manager. “We were the first to market with the OCTEON™ Plus CN5650 series on an AdvancedMC™ form factor and, with the plethora of new performance and feature enhancements of the OCTEON™ II, we will be able to give our clients an even more competitive edge in their market space.”

“Cavium Networks fully expects to realize even greater success with its OCTEON™ II processors in the rapidly growing xTCA carrier grade platform market,” said Tasha Castañeda, Senior Strategic Alliance Manager, Cavium Networks. “As a premier COTS vendor, Kontron has already achieved much in the way of new OCTEON-based design wins across a diverse range of applications. Combining our versatile, high performance multicore processors with standards-based hardware will continue to be an extremely attractive solution to resolve the costs and resource challenges faced by today's leading equipment manufacturers.”

Cavium Networks OCTEON™ II technical details
The recently announced Cavium Networks next generation OCTEON™ II Internet Application Processor (IAP) family is designed for the next generation of Hypernetworks serving enterprise, data center, access and service provider markets which require support for converged data, voice and video. The OCTEON™ II target applications include switches, routers, appliances, equipment for 3G, WiMAX, LTE, wireless LAN, and unified storage systems and adapters. The OCTEON™ II family integrates 1 to 32 MIPS64 cores, up to 75 Application Acceleration Engines for quality of service, packet processing, TCP, compression, encryption, RAID, de-duplication and regular expression processing, up to 400Gbps of DDR3 memory bandwidth, and up to 100Gbps of network connectivity while consuming only 2W to 60W across the entire family.

For more information about OCTEON™ II please visit: http://www.caviumnetworks.com/OCTEON_II_MIPS64.html.

Kontron AM42xx AdvancedMC™ Intelligent IO modules for packet processing
Kontron currently offers two modules - the Kontron AM4204 with 4x 1GbE ports to the front and software configurable Interfaces to the Fabric side (PCIe, 4x 1GbE or XAUI); and the Kontron AM4220 with 2x 10GbE to the front and PCIe to the fabric side. Each one is designed with OCTEON™ Plus CN5650 packet processors with 12 64bit MIPS cores supporting up to 14.4 Billion MIPS64 instructions per second (14.4 GOPS). They are the first to be designed with high-density, high-bandwidth serial IO technology compared with legacy parallel IO technology, and are optimized for layer 4 to layer 7 data and security processing for 3G/4G BTS, RNC, xGSN and Media Gateway applications.

A third module, optimized for 10GbE MicroTCA™ platform backplanes, will be beta-released
during Q2, 09.

For more information about Kontron AM42xx AdvancedMC™ modules please visit:
http://www.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/advancedmc/io/am42xx.html