They are calling it an NPU: Network Processing Unit

Apr 25, 2012 12:10 GMT  ·  By

Broadcom has recently presented the industry's first 100 Gbps Full Duplex Network Processing Unit (NPU), on its official website.

The well-known California-based network company has designed this new chip with cost reduction in mind. It contains 64 custom processors working at a high 1GHz speed and is fully programmable, like the rest of the BCM88030 family.

Broadcom claims that its new NPU delivers more than twice the output of any other NPU on the market right now but. Despite the chip’s complexity, with the level of integration that has been put into the design, the system cost is reduced by 80 percent per 10 GbE port.

Cisco estimates that this year the number of connected devices is set to exceed the world's population, with an estimated 7 billion devices connected to the network.

Just three years from now, 90 percent of content viewed on mobile devices will be streaming video, and application downloads are expected to surpass 47 billion per year.

To satisfy this overwhelming need for bandwidth, service providers are working to upgrade and modernize their networks to higher bandwidth links.

Although these types of devices will not reach our PC soon, for the networking industry, the annual growth rate of 100G Ethernet capable ports will grow around 170 percent until 2016, as service providers rush to meet the bandwidth demand.

The BCM88030 NPU family was designed with cost reduction in mind. It supports low-cost DDR3 memory and comes with Seamless integration with XLP multi-core processors for best-in-class control plane processing.

As previously mentioned, the BCM88030 family has three brothers:  the 100 Gbps BCM88038 NPU, the 50 Gbps BCM88034 NPU and the BCM88032 24 Gbps NPU.

All of them are only sampling right now, but volume production is slated for the second half of this year.