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These chips are designed for networking equipment, not general purpose code. I don't understand how come the article fails to make this explicitly clear. Netwo

by 4ad 12y ago

These chips are designed for networking equipment, not general purpose code. I don't understand how come the article fails to make this explicitly clear. Networking code has no problem with this high core count mostly because it was already written to work on already high-core count MIPS systems. For example, the previous MIPS64 offerings from Cavium pack 48 cores on a chip...

jsnell 12y ago
Why do you claim that these chips are designed for networking? The article isn't just omitting the target market like you imply, but is very clear about Cavium targeting servers rather than just networking appliances. (I'm a lot pessimistic than most of the people in this thread. Network processors haven't really made a lot of sense compared to Xeons even for networking applications for a few years. Why would they do any better in the general purpose market?)
- windexh8er 12y ago
  They are not just designed for networking, but the bulk of their customers are: A10, F5, Sonicwall, Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks (http://www.cavium.com/winning_products.html http://www.cavium.com/winning_products.html) "...haven't really made a lot of sense..." - You are completely wrong here. Most data center grade networking equipment does not run Xeon and the products that do are generally significantly less performant. Especially when it comes to security or packet inspection.
  - kjs3 12y ago
    If you narrow the statement down to "the highest performance network gear don't use Xeons", I suppose you get to be right. Almost all of my data-center security and packet inspection devices have a Xeon or two in them. The Cisco ASAs, Fireeye APT probes, Imperva WAFs, F5 load balancers, Sourcefire IDS. A couple of them also have packet processing support hardware (Endace cards, mostly), but that's mostly for taking the packet processing off the Xeons and letting them do just the inspection. But hey, we're only doing a couple of gig sustained, so we aren't the cool kids.
- 4ad 12y ago
  > Why do you claim that these chips are designed for networking? Because this is Cavium's niche and biggest asset, and all their customers are doing networking. Of course they might want to expand their business, but they have always done that, really, and they only had success in networking. The special features of this chip (things that are Cavium-specific and not ARM64 specific) are features that make a lot of sense for networking equipment, and are not very important for general purpose servers. These special features are also present in their existing MIPS64 line. > Network processors haven't really made a lot of sense compared to Xeons even for networking applications for a few years. Really? Where's that 100GbE Xeon switch?
  - jsnell 12y ago
    > Because this is Cavium's niche and biggest asset, and all their customers are doing networking. That's their current niche. They're trying to get out of that niche, as the article clearly shows. (Let's be clear here -- the article might be a PR fluff piece, but it hasn't been written in an ignorance of the position of Cavium in networking). If they try to market this stuff for general purpose servers, they need to have an answer to the problem of parallelizing general purpose workloads. I don't see why this is such an offensive thing to point out. I work at a company making networking equipment (mainly for telecoms), targeting the 20Gbps range at the top end, with Xeons. We could scale much higher for trivial workloads like switching, but the bottleneck is in actual processing where the wimpy MIPS cores aren't particularly tempting. The offerings of companies like Cavium have really not looked compelling compared to standard Xeons during the last 4 years or so. Maybe if we'd started before that, we'd have started with a network processor and would naturally stick to it. But many of the more established telecom suppliers we've interacted with are likewise doing significant amounts of stuff with Xeons (standard hardware, or ATCA blades at the most exotic end). The only Cavium card I remember anyone using was doing 10Gbps of traffic that was so trivial, that even the low-spec 1U Xeon server the card was installed in could have handled it with the proper userspace NIC drivers.
xeroxmalf 12y ago
Directly from the article: "Cavium plans four families of Thunder chips, targeting storage, networking, and security systems in addition to servers. Each family will use a different set of I/O and accelerator blocks from Cavium's existing silicon library." So no, these are not just designed for networking equipment, they are planned to target 4 different areas.
- 4ad 12y ago
  If I question the legitimacy of the article, you can't quote the article in as an argument for the article. See my other reponse and windexh8er's.

by 4ad 12y ago

jsnell 12y ago

Why do you claim that these chips are designed for networking? The article isn't just omitting the target market like you imply, but is very clear about Cavium targeting servers rather than just networking appliances. (I'm a lot pessimistic than most of the people in this thread. Network processors haven't really made a lot of sense compared to Xeons even for networking applications for a few years. Why would they do any better in the general purpose market?)

windexh8er 12y ago
They are not just designed for networking, but the bulk of their customers are: A10, F5, Sonicwall, Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks (http://www.cavium.com/winning_products.html http://www.cavium.com/winning_products.html) "...haven't really made a lot of sense..." - You are completely wrong here. Most data center grade networking equipment does not run Xeon and the products that do are generally significantly less performant. Especially when it comes to security or packet inspection.
- kjs3 12y ago
  If you narrow the statement down to "the highest performance network gear don't use Xeons", I suppose you get to be right. Almost all of my data-center security and packet inspection devices have a Xeon or two in them. The Cisco ASAs, Fireeye APT probes, Imperva WAFs, F5 load balancers, Sourcefire IDS. A couple of them also have packet processing support hardware (Endace cards, mostly), but that's mostly for taking the packet processing off the Xeons and letting them do just the inspection. But hey, we're only doing a couple of gig sustained, so we aren't the cool kids.
4ad 12y ago
> Why do you claim that these chips are designed for networking? Because this is Cavium's niche and biggest asset, and all their customers are doing networking. Of course they might want to expand their business, but they have always done that, really, and they only had success in networking. The special features of this chip (things that are Cavium-specific and not ARM64 specific) are features that make a lot of sense for networking equipment, and are not very important for general purpose servers. These special features are also present in their existing MIPS64 line. > Network processors haven't really made a lot of sense compared to Xeons even for networking applications for a few years. Really? Where's that 100GbE Xeon switch?
- jsnell 12y ago
  > Because this is Cavium's niche and biggest asset, and all their customers are doing networking. That's their current niche. They're trying to get out of that niche, as the article clearly shows. (Let's be clear here -- the article might be a PR fluff piece, but it hasn't been written in an ignorance of the position of Cavium in networking). If they try to market this stuff for general purpose servers, they need to have an answer to the problem of parallelizing general purpose workloads. I don't see why this is such an offensive thing to point out. I work at a company making networking equipment (mainly for telecoms), targeting the 20Gbps range at the top end, with Xeons. We could scale much higher for trivial workloads like switching, but the bottleneck is in actual processing where the wimpy MIPS cores aren't particularly tempting. The offerings of companies like Cavium have really not looked compelling compared to standard Xeons during the last 4 years or so. Maybe if we'd started before that, we'd have started with a network processor and would naturally stick to it. But many of the more established telecom suppliers we've interacted with are likewise doing significant amounts of stuff with Xeons (standard hardware, or ATCA blades at the most exotic end). The only Cavium card I remember anyone using was doing 10Gbps of traffic that was so trivial, that even the low-spec 1U Xeon server the card was installed in could have handled it with the proper userspace NIC drivers.

xeroxmalf 12y ago

Directly from the article: "Cavium plans four families of Thunder chips, targeting storage, networking, and security systems in addition to servers. Each family will use a different set of I/O and accelerator blocks from Cavium's existing silicon library." So no, these are not just designed for networking equipment, they are planned to target 4 different areas.

4ad 12y ago
If I question the legitimacy of the article, you can't quote the article in as an argument for the article. See my other reponse and windexh8er's.