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> 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

by 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.

by 4ad 12y ago

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.