The aTCA-N700 is a single slot AdvancedTCAR (ATCA) blade powered by dual OCTEON II multi-core processors for high performance packet processing applications such as IPTV, LTE wireless, security and many more areas. The blade provides up to 40Gbps full duplex packet processing performance with flexible network interfaces. The aTCA-N700 is designed to provide high performance security enabled intelligent deep packet inspection and processing functions that are required by high-end network appliances, security appliances, switches, and servers. The major building block is the Cavium CN6880 packet processor subsystem. The Cavium CN6880 has 2MB of L2 cache which is shared by 32 cnMIPS cores. Each cnMIPS core also has dedicated 37K lcache and 32K Dcache. DDR3 memory has a total of 400Gbps bandwidth. Hardware acceleration blocks are also available for the most advanced networking and security application. The RegEx engine enables high throughput pattern matching with optional co-processors. The blade also has a high performance, non-blocking, local switch fabric to interconnect the CN6880, backplane, and I/O ports altogether. This feature allows the data path to be configured in many different ways to fully utilize the multi-core CPUs and provide the flexibility for application programming. There are 3 modes of data path operation: serial, parallel, and by pass, which can be configured depending on the application requirements. The application areas of the blade are summarized but not limited to:
Wireless backhaul aggregation Switch/Router, which requires Deep Packet Inspection capability Security Appliances such as Firewalls, VPN and IDS/IPS Content based fine grain load balancing switches Front end I/O card with traffic management for high capacity, value added appliances for multi-service offering Network Monitoring and Analysis Services Ethernet aggregation nodes