Marvell launched the latest generation of its Octeon infrastructure processors that power networking equipment like switches, routers, secure gateways, firewalls, base stations, and smartNICs. John Sakamoto, VP of Marvell's Infrastructure Processors Business, said the chips are being aimed at enterprise network security, 5G, edge, cloud, and data center appliances.

The first of the two chips, the Octeon TX2, is available with four to 36 Arm v8 cores and a set of hardware accelerators, which as the name suggests are designed to speed up security, packet processing, and traffic management. The chip delivers a 250% higher performance compared to the previous generation with throughput ranging from 10 Gb/s to more than 200 GB/s depending on the unit. Sakamoto said these accelerators are vital to keeping up with the accelerating traffic demands created by IoT and 5G.

"Because of the higher traffic rates generated by these devices, the days of just throwing CPU cores and trying to handle the higher data rates, I think is something that's run out of steam," he said.

The new chips are backed by Marvell's software development kit (SDK), which includes support for multiple Linux distributions, virtualization, containers, a data-plane development kit, protocol stacks, infrastructure management and orchestration like OpenStack Kubernetes, and virtual network functions (VNFs). Additionally, Marvell also supports a full routing stack.

Three Octeon variations are launching today, offering between four and 24 cores and 20 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s data paths. A fourth unit offering up to 36 cores and a 200-Gb/s data path is slated to launch in the second quarter.

Launching alongside the Octeon TX2 is Marvell's Octeon Fusion wireless infrastructure processor, which is designed for use in cellular base stations including baseband units and small radio units. This includes increased computational demands of 5G networks and distributed unit processing for 5G split architectures.

John Schimpf, SVP of product marketing for Marvel's wireless business unit, said that the Octeon Fusion is essentially a fusion of a Layer 1 processor and the Octeon TX2 infrastructure processor. "We get to take advantage of all of those capabilities that already exist in the Octeon family," he explained.

Schimpf said the chip provides OEMs an alternative to developing an in-house ASIC. "By collaborating with Tier-1 [OEMs] in the design, we're able to provide what we believe is the performance of an ASIC but still have the flexibility of a processor," he said.

And flexibility is key to Marvell's positioning of the chip. The Octeon Fusion is designed to support the roll out of 4G LTE networks with the option of supporting a 5G refresh down the road. "Octeon fusion can accommodate that future upgrade path with just a software upgrade," Schimpf added.

Marvell says both the Octeon TX2 and Fusion chips are available in custom varieties allowing customers to integrate their own proprietary intellectual property (IP).

Together with the Octeon TX2 and Marvell's high-end ThunderX2 chips, the three chips form the basis of the company's radio access network (RAN) infrastructure.

"Marvell’s Octeon and Fusion updates represent [the] chip vendor rapidly moving to fulfill the need for more powerful and flexible silicon to address carrier’s needs to deploy 5G infrastructure, whether it be a 5G macro cell, base station, and radio access network," wrote Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, in an email to SDxCentral. "What I’m most impressed with are Marvell’s performance per watt and flexibility to add custom IP."

The announcement comes a week after Intel announced the availability of its Atom p5900 CPU, which is based on the company's 10-nanometer manufacturing process and is designed specifically with 5G base stations in mind.

Moorhead says it is quickly becoming a two-horse race between in Intel and Marvell in the networking processor space.

Intel has already secured partnerships to deploy the new Atom chip on Ericsson and ZTE appliances, with a third unnamed partner coming on later this year.  The chipmaker now claims it will achieve dominance in the base station market by 2021.

By comparison, Marvell's largest customer in the telecom vendor space has been Samsung.