The Linley Tech Processor Conference attracted 300 attendees.

In the first day’s sessions, one could easily get the impression that multicores are up to the task of network processing. Thanks to Mike Coward of RadiSys, however, the bold marketing claims got a good reality check. RadiSys build systems based on multicore technology. Today, they do 10G per line card. In two, years, they expect to run up to 100G, and 100G in a single chip is likely four years out, all according to his estimation.

For those that don’t want to wait this long, you are welcome to Xelerated. Our 100G wirespeed NPU is here, and now going into production. And in addition to any of the multicore processors in the market, it also includes an advanced traffic manager.

Update: Xelerated’s presentation on ‘Uncompromised throughput at low power’ can be found here.

The Network Processor (NPU) industry is no different. A new generation comes with significant more processing power, and still our customers ask for more. There are more standards coming down the road, and there are more features requested by service providers around the world. Demand is always more, never less.

At the recent Linley tech seminar Xelerated’s Vice President of Business Development, Thomas Eklund, delivered a presentation – available for download on Slideshare – on the importance of service density in the NPU business. If your processing device can’t manage all the network services expected, then you will find your Research & Development department under hard stress to balance features and performance against available resources.  The need for greater service density is an important aspect for the whole service provider industry. If next generation routers and switching platforms can be built with greater headroom for new services, we can extend the lifetime of the equipment, and thereby strengthen the business case for the broadband services.

Service density can be a bit hard to measure, but doing some very basic calculations on the raw service processing capabilities of a particular chip is fairly straightforward and this will give you a rough idea on the capabilities of the chip. Failing to do this in an evaluation process for a new line card design often leads to unhappy surprises at a very late stage in the project. In turn this results in risk of missing an important market window, as well as signficantly increased engineering and product costs.  So take a look and find out – how much service density is your chip providing?

Update: this post was re-published at Advanced TCA Systems Web Site.

One key observation is that an NPU has an enormous amount of service density and could, when used together with a multicore processor, increase the overall performance and transaction rate while lowering the power significantly. The number of instructions per packet is 23 times (yes, you read that correctly!) over a state-of-the-art Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 multicore processor. Combining the strength of a state-of-the-art multicore processor and an Xelerated NPU can dramatically improve the overall solution.

It is interesting to see that the data center server players are adding switching functionality, and at the same time, the router and switch vendors are adding server functionality. They end up competing with each other. When the switch becomes a server, and the server becomes a switch, it opens up for a period of strong innovations.  Which architecture model will prevail in the future?