Cavium Announces Availability of ThunderX 

Cavium, Inc. today announced availability of both single socket and dual socket versions of its ARMv8 ThunderX family of processors.  The workload optimized ThunderX CN88xx product line is the highest performance family of ARMv8 SoC processors for next generation Data Center and Cloud infrastructure.

ThunderX is the fifth generation of high performance, multi-core processors from Cavium targeting Data Centers and Cloud infrastructure. This family of processors offers workload optimized SKU's targeting compute, storage, networking and secure compute segments.  The product family is based on highly efficient, full custom processor cores designed by Cavium in 28nm process technology under architectural license from ARM. It is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture as well as ARM's Server Base System Architecture (SBSA), while bringing to market significant enhancements including:

• The first ARM based SoC that scales from 24 to 48 cores in a pin compatible foot print.
• The first ARM based SoC to be fully cache coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI).
• Integrated I/O capacity with hundreds of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth.
• Up to four DDR3/4 72 bit memory controllers capable of supporting 2400MHz memories up to 1TB of memory capacity in a dual socket configuration.
• Hundreds of integrated hardware accelerators for security, storage, networking and virtualization.
• Standard based low latency Ethernet fabric enabling interconnections of thousands of ThunderX nodes.
• Full system virtualization using Cavium virtSoC technology.
• Best in class performance per watt and performance per dollar for the target applications.

ThunderX includes four families with custom I/O and accelerators optimized for target workloads:

• ThunderX_CP: For Cloud compute workloads such as public & private clouds, web caching, web serving, search and social media data analytics.
• ThunderX_ST: For Cloud storage, big data and distributed data bases.
• ThunderX_NT: For Telecom/ NFV server and embedded networking applications.
• ThunderX_SC: For Secure computing applications.

"Over the past decade, Cavium has been a pioneer in delivering high performance, multi-core processors to the market. ThunderX is our flagship ARMv8 multi core processor family with the highest core counts and the most comprehensive set of I/O and accelerators in the market. The ThunderX based solutions are fully optimized for a wide variety of next-generation Data Center and cloud workloads," said Gopal Hegde, VP/GM of Data Center Processor Group at Cavium. "ThunderX is a disruptive technology that enables our customers to deliver highly integrated, high performance, best in class platforms," he added.

Cavium is fully committed to industry standards, support for Open Source development and has a strategic and expanding core of blue chip software partners. Cavium's engagement in the software ecosystem includes membership in the UEFI Forum, open source and industry groups such as OpenStack Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Open NFV Platform, FreeBSD foundation, the Xen Advisory Board and Linaro. Cavium plays an active role in upstream Linux Kernel and tool chain development that ensures standard support for all ThunderX product families and features and demonstrate support for Linux and FreeBSD OS distributions. These include Red Hat, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, openSUSE and MontaVista. The ThunderX platform enables efficient and scalable virtualization support via KVM and Xen and includes full support for standard development environments including the GCC suite, OpenJDK and Oracle Java. Many of these are available today for the ThunderX family. In addition, Cavium is working directly with strategic commercial partners across the entire software ecosystem including application providers for Data Analytics, Web and Scale Out Storage.