Editor: Linley
Gwennap In This Issue
A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects will soon be available. Get the latest information on this vitally important market. For more information, visit our web site. This week, Intel announced a new organizational structure at the highest levels, aligning its product groups around target markets such as mobile, digital home, and enterprise. Lacking from the new structure is a group focused on communications infrastructure; instead, the popular IXP NPU and other communications products are in the new enterprise group, headed by Pat Gelsinger, who was Intel's CTO. Sean Maloney, formerly head of Intel's Communications Group (ICG), now leads the Mobility Group, which includes the Centrino 802.11 products. These moves put incoming Intel president Paul Otellini's stamp on the organization chart. The Communications Group reflected former president Craig Barrett's efforts to increase Intel's revenue by branching out to a new market. Barrett invested more than $10 billion in this effort, with little return. Despite Maloney's valiant efforts, ICG did not show a quarterly profit during the past three years. Mixing the communications products with Intel's highly profitable enterprise processors will hide any further losses from public view. Otellini, whose Intel experience is entirely on the PC and server side, will not have to deal directly with the comms products. According to an Intel spokesman, the company remains committed to its network processors and other communications products, such as its optical components and Ethernet chips; all product roadmaps remain in place. As Gelsinger takes over his new group, however, he will over time review all of his product lines from a business standpoint and may adjust their level of funding. We believe that Intel's NPU line is not yet profitable; Gelsinger's degree of patience with this situation is unknown. We expect further details will be disclosed at Intel Developer Forum in March. —LG Complete
coverage of Intel's IXP line appears in our recent report A
Guide to Network Processors.
This week, Cavium announced it is sampling two new secure communications processors—the CN220 and CN225—that provide a feature and performance upgrade to the Nitrox SOHO family in a pin-compatible package. Slated for production release later in 1Q05, the CN220 is priced below $20 and the CN225 below $25 in 10,000-unit quantities. Unlike competing devices, these processors support both SSL and IPSec VPNs, with large-packet bulk-crypto performance of 200Mbps and up to 100 IKE or SSL handshakes per second. The CN22x processors also provide 200Mbps large-packet throughput for firewalling and routing, enough for SME or SOHO gateway applications. Cavium's P-trie lookup algorithm removes any performance penalty for multitunnel VPN operation. Three integrated 10/100 Ethernet MACs provide network connectivity, supporting the WAN, the LAN, and an optional DMZ. WLAN client chipsets are supported through the 32-bit/33-MHz PCI bus; the CN22x also support CCMP for wireless applications. On the basis of IPSec performance, the CN22x is superior to secure processors from Broadcom and Intel and comparable to Freescale's secure PowerQuicc II processors. The CN22x uniquely provides hardware support for authentication and has excellent small-packet performance (around 30Mbps for bulk crypto). These attributes, which do not add a price premium, improve the user experience in SME applications, especially with high-bandwidth broadband access such as VDSL or FTTH. —SI Complete
coverage of secure communications processors appears in our
report A Guide to Communications Processors. Chelsio has closed a $25 million third round of funding led by new investor Invesco. Existing investors, including Sequoia, New Enterprise Associates, Global Catalyst, and others, also participated in the latest round. With this sizable new round, Chelsio has raised a total of $55 million. The company is shipping the industry's first 10GbE TOE adapter (NIC) and iSCSI HBA to OEM customers. Chelsio expects to reach profitability by 2006 without raising additional funds. —BW Coverage of Chelsio will appear in an upcoming report from The Linley Group.
This year's Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco will include a new event, called Microprocessor Summit, on Monday, March 7. This one-day event will focus on the newest processors, including general-purpose CPUs, DSPs, and network processors. Three tracks will be chaired by CMP's Jim Turley, BDTI's Jeff Bier, and our own Linley Gwennap. Linley will be moderating two sessions of interest to our readers. The first covers high-performance CPUs including PMC-Sierra's RM9150, AMCC's PowerPC 440, and AMD's Geode NX. Can the x86 chip hold its own against two integrated RISC processors? The second session includes Cavium's Octeon, EZchip's NP-2, and Intel's IXP2800 in a showdown of high-speed networking processors. Which chip is best for complex packet processing? Find out at Microprocessor Summit. For more details on the conference and the program, click here.
Embedded Systems Programming: Comparing Embedded Processors EE Times: Understanding Backplane, Chip-to-Chip Tech
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