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Cavium Accelerates Customers Time to Market with ThunderX™ Reference Platforms in Industry Standard 1U and 2U Form Factors

SAN JOSE, Calif., December 1, 2014 – Cavium, Inc., (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking, today announced  ThunderX CN88xx based Reference Platforms.  These reference platforms are offered in two industry standard form factors:

ThunderX 1K: Single socket configuration in an ATX form factor mother board in a standard 1U chassis with dual redundant power supplies. Key features include:

  • 40 GbE QSFP+ and  10 GbE SFP+ ports
  • 2 x8 PCIe Gen3 slots
  • 4 x 2.5”/3.5” HDD slots with option for additional 8 x 2.5” HDDs
  • 8 x DDR3 slots for standard RDIMMs up to 1866MHz

ThunderX 2K: Dual socket configuration in 1/2 SSI form factor sled in an industry standard 2U chassis that can accommodate up to 4 sleds with dual redundant power supplies. Key features on each sled include: 

  • 40 GbE QSFP+ and  10 GbE SFP+ ports
  • 1 x16 and 1 x8 PCIe Gen3 slots
  • Up to 3 x 3.5” or 6 x 2.5” HDDs or SSDs
  • 8 x DDR4 slots for  standard RDIMMS up to 2133MHz

A ThunderX 2K system consisting of four such sleds is capable of delivering 4X the capacity of above configuration.

Both platforms support IPMI based management through the Aspeed 2400 BMC controller with the AMI MegaRAC™ Management Solution, standard UEFI boot implementation with the AMI Aptio Firmware compliant with the SBSA and SBBR specifications, a wide variety of OSes including Red Hat, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, openSUSE and MontaVista along with industry standard software development environments such as Oracle’s Java8, OpenJDK, and the GNU tool chain.

These industry standard reference platforms will help accelerate time to market for Cavium’s OEM and ODM partners along with enablement of the ARM eco-system and Cavium’s software partners. Complete hardware collateral including schematics, layout, BOM, and simulation models are available for these platforms today.

“ThunderX based reference systems deliver the industry’s most comprehensive ARMv8 based server class platforms for hyperscale Data Center, Cloud servers, Big Data and Scale Out storage systems.” said Rishi Chugh, Director ThunderX Product Marketing at Cavium. “Cavium is also aggressively enabling our ecosystem partners to leverage these platforms to accelerate software validation and optimization on ThunderX.”

The ThunderX product family is the best in class 64-bit ARMv8 server processor for next generation Data Center and cloud applications. ThunderX SoC integrates high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, high memory bandwidth, large memory capacity, integrated hardware accelerators, integrated feature rich high bandwidth network and storage I/O, fully virtualized core and I/O, and scalable high bandwidth, low latency Ethernet fabric. ThunderX solution enables best in class performance per dollar and performance per watt.  The ThunderX family includes multiple workload optimized SKUs that enable servers and appliances that are optimized for compute, storage, network and secure compute workloads. The ThunderX processor family is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture specifications as well as ARM’s SBSA and SBBR standards and is widely supported by industry leading OS, Hypervisor and SW tool and application vendors.

More detailed information about the ThunderX product line and reference platforms including product briefs and ordering information is available at http://www.cavium.com/ThunderX_ARM_Processors.html.

Availability

Contact your local Cavium sales representatives for further information and order placement.

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