Broadcom launched a new chipset series this week with software-defined networking and network functions virtualization in mind.
According to the company, the XLP500 series has a “quad-issue, quad-threaded superscalar architecture with out-of-order execution” as well as supporting Broadcom’s Open NFV platform and interoperability with its switch series,
The company claims that the optimization of the chips with its NFV platform and switch series “streamlines the development process, optimizes power requirements, reduces hardware cost and improves time to market.”
“We’ve put a lot of work into making sure our processors and switches work very well together,” said Nick Ilyadis, CTO of the infrastructure and networking group at Broadcom.
He added that the performance of the network in the data center is crucial for cloud-based services.
“The network makes or breaks the cloud,” he said, noting that workloads are changing in unpredictable ways and that what that network or cloud resource is used for must be flexible.
“Rapid growth in network traffic has expedited the adoption of SDN and NFV by carriers in order to cost-effectively overlay control and compute power onto their existing infrastructure,” said Linley Gwennap, who is principal analyst at The Linley Group as well as editor-in-chief of the Microprocessor Report. “The combination of four-issue superscalar execution and four-way multithreading is unique among embeddedprocessors and the XLP500 Series raises the bar for embedded processors that are optimized for communications.”
Broadcom is demonstrating the new series of processors at the Interop show this week in Las Vegas.
