Netronome Powers Ahead with 200 Gbps Flow Processor

Netronome introduced its 200 Gbps NFP-6xxx family of network flow processors based on Intel’s 22nm 3-D TriGate technology and designed for high-performance networking applications that require programmable, line-rate, stateful processing on millions of simultaneous, complex flows. The devices deliver full L2-L7 processing on both packets and flows, with 120 cores being devoted to flow processing and 96 cores for packet processing. The company claims over six times the packet processing performance at less than half the power compared to 28nm-based processing alternatives.

Netronome’s new family processors, which are expected to hit the market a year from now, are aimed at intelligent line cards, service blades and PCIe cards in applications such as carrier networking, cyber security, software defined networking including OpenFlow, mobile networking, virtualized datacenters and cloud computing.

Netronome has incorporated a number of innovations into the new NFPs, including:

• 256 Gbps Processing Complex: 216 fully-programmable, workload-specific cores, featuring 120 L2-L7 flow processing cores with 960 threads, and 96 L2-L3 packet processing cores, delivering over 307 billion instructions per second to 384M packets per second.
• 12 Tbps of internal bandwidth and 17MB of Proximity Memory supports the ability to handle 120 million simultaneous flows.
• Over 100 hardware acclerators are provided on-chip to handle specific tasks such as deep packet inspection, expression matching, traffic aggregation, bulk cryptography, IPv4-6 lookups, etc.
• an optimized memory architecture provides over 30 MB of on-chip storage and eliminates external SRAM.
• an integrated 50 Gbps security processor provides hardware accelerated bulk cryptography for all major cipher suites.
• 720 Gbps of Processor I/O: 72x10G KR-capable SERDES interfaces anchor high-bandwidth access to the chip, including 10G/40G/100G Ethernet with integrated MACs and 10G/40G/100G Interlaken. The high-density I/O removes the need for separate aggregation devices and enables line-rate 200 Gbps designs with optional support for 4-to-1 oversubscription. The NFP-6xxx family also supports dedicated 4×8 PCI Gen3 interfaces for applications demanding high bandwidth, dynamic load balancing to Intel x86 processors.

In addition, NFP-6xxx product line, which represents the sixth generation of Netronome flow processors, provides a software-compatible migration for customers of Netronome’s current NFP. The company features a graphical integrated development environment, C-compiler, packet generator, and cycle- and timing- accurate simulators. Developer’s may program in C or take advantage of APIs to Netronome’s flow management software. Netronome’s flow management software provides code for intrusion detection and prevention, next-generation firewall, OpenFlow, SSL inspection, IPsec, IP/MPLS carrier networking, data loss prevention, network forensics, deep packet inspection and application identification, stateful load balancing, IP test and measurement, intelligent network taps, and high frequency trading.

“We experienced tremendous growth last year as a direct result of our early commitment to flow processing and its supporting building blocks. The NFP-6xxx strengthens this commitment and extends the benefits of high throughput flow aware processing to our leading edge customers,�? said Howard Bubb, CEO of Netronome. “With a 10x increase in flow processing capabilities, the NFP-6xxx will accelerate the movement from packet to flow-aware processing for a wide range of advanced network services.�?