August 1, 2012 -- Cavium, Inc. today announced its Project Thunder Initiative. Project Thunder will deliver a family of highly integrated, multicore SOC processors that will incorporate highly optimized, full-custom cores built from the ground up based on the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set architecture (ISA) into an SOC that the company believes will redefine features, performance, power and cost metrics for the next-generation cloud and data-center markets.

Cavium is collaborating with lead tier-1 vendors and ecosystem partners to deliver breakthrough solutions for this market. Project Thunder processor solutions for compute and storage applications along with the OCTEON and NITROX processor families will significantly expand Cavium's addressable market in the next-generation cloud and datacenter.

Project Thunder leverages significant amounts of in-house IP and builds upon Cavium's proven track record of developing and delivering, 2- to 48-core SOC processors with industry-leading performance, scalability and integration based on the MIPS and ARM architectures. Cavium has chosen to use MIPS or ARM architectures based upon the target end-market, industry trends, installed software base, ecosystem and customer demand. Cavium is also leveraging its extensive expertise in developing multicore software solutions to provide highly optimized and scalable stacks, libraries and applications along with a rich set of development and optimization tools by working with ecosystem partners, end customers and contributing directly to open source.

Project Thunder provides a scalable family of 64-bit ARMv8 processors incorporated into a highly differentiated SOC architecture optimized for cloud and data-center applications. The family of SOCs will integrate high-performance compute, networking, security, storage along with targeted workload-application acceleration and high-speed industry-standard IOs. Project Thunder processors will provide up to 10X price, performance and power value proposition over alternative solutions for target applications. Cavium will announce the details of Project Thunder at a later date.

Posted by: John Miklosz