Freescale’s QorIQ processors are finding their way into every part of the network from backbone to device. The latest family member targets the network edge, an increasingly strategic area where operators and standards bodies believe much of the intelligence will be located as devices proliferate and become highly distributed. It is designed to support emerging CPE designs incorporating virtualization, as well as industrial control systems.
The latest additions to the QorIQ-based LayerScape range are the LS1088A octacore and LS1048A quad-core processors, both based on ARM’s 64-bit Cortex-A53 design. Matt Short, senior QorIQ product engineer, told EETimes that the new products have been specifically designed for intelligent edge access equipment; NFV (Network Function Virtualization) and virtual CPE solutions; industrial control systems; and intelligent virtualized NIC (network interface card) applications, which can be part of broader SDN programs.
The requirements for processors at the network edge are very different from those in the backbone, which is all about bandwidth and data forwarding rates. At the edge, the priority is adaptability, responding dynamically to changes in system or end user needs in the control or management planes. In the internet of things, download rates give way to low latency, uplink and support for a wide variety of traffic patterns, in terms of design priority.
This gives Freescale an opportunity to leapfrog rivals, which have tended to outperform its processors in terms of raw speed in the data plane of the backbone network. Its acknowledged strength has been in the performance of its PowerPC-based processors in the control and management planes. Now it has the chance to bring those same strengths to ARM-based designs, which are being pushed at the network edge while Power remains in the backbone.
For these reasons, the latest QorIQ generation includes 4-8 Cortex-A53 processors in the management plane as well as two 10Gbps and eight Gigabit Ethernet wire rate processors, and a 10Gbps I/O processor for complex packet processing in a network switch data-routing plane. Flexibility comes from the updated programmable data path architecture (DPAA2), which includes acceleration engines for fast swapping of virtualized networks.
Freescale has its own development tools, and its new chips also support Linux and open source technologies such as Open Flow, OpenStack and OpenDaylight.
QorIQ also now supports the Open Dataplane Standard (ODP). “ODP is designed to abstract networking functions even further than what has been possible previously,” Short said. “It makes use of a set of APIs that allow many vendor-optimized implementations becoming common at the network edge to be implemented easily.”
Such moves will be important to fend off competitors like Broadcom and Cavium, which have shone in the backbone but been less threatening to Freescale at the edge. Now that operators are increasingly interested in an intelligent network edge to support virtualization and the IoT, these chip designers will be putting more resource into upping their game in that market too.