Collaboration to Deliver First FreeBSD Reference for ThunderX™ Workload Optimized Processor Family
SAN JOSE, CA and Boulder, CO., October 1, 2014 –Cavium, Inc., (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking announced today that it is collaborating with the FreeBSD Foundation to develop and deliver the first ARMv8 reference design and implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System based on the ThunderX workload optimized processor family for next generation Data Center and Cloud workloads (http://cavium.com/ThunderX_ARM_Processors.html).
FreeBSD is the most widely used open-source BSD distribution, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed systems running open-source BSD derivatives. FreeBSD is widely used in infrastructure applications such as storage, web and media streaming applications and environments. With a repository of over 24,000 applications FreeBSD provides a broad array of options for developers, system administrators and end users.
In collaborating with the FreeBSD Foundation Cavium will contribute directly to the Foundation, supply engineering expertise and provide reference ThunderX hardware for the development community. This collaboration is expected to result in Tier 1 recognition of the ARMv8 architecture along with an optimized implementation for the Cavium ThunderX processor family. ThunderX delivers many unique and differentiated capabilities to the ARMv8 server market including support for 48 cores in a single SoC with GICV3, cache coherent dual socket support using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI™), end to end virtualization through virtSoC™ technology and integrated hardware accelerators for security, storage, networking and virtualization applications.
“Collaborating with Cavium allows the Foundation and the FreeBSD Project to deliver a high quality ARMv8 server solution that delivers the high performance platform that FreeBSD developers, vendors and users have come to expect,” said George Neville-Neil, FreeBSD Foundation Board Member. “We applaud Cavium for stepping forward to work directly with the open source community via the FreeBSD Project and are looking forward to using ThunderX as the basis of our reference implementation.”
“The collaboration between Cavium and the FreeBSD Foundation to deliver a reference BSD implementation for data center and cloud infrastructure continues to build the momentum for open source on the ARMv8-A architecture,” said Lakshmi Mandyam, director, server systems and ecosystems, ARM. “Cavium’s contribution to the FreeBSD project will complement the efforts of ARM and its partners to enable scalable performance and compelling energy efficiency improvements for next-generation infrastructure deployments.”
“Cavium is excited to enter into this collaboration with the FreeBSD Foundation. FreeBSD is a well respected development community and brings critical software expertise and valued application enablement to our ThunderX ecosystem”, said Larry Wikelius, Director Thunder Ecosystems and Partner Enablement at Cavium. “This collaboration addresses growing customer demand for ThunderX large scale system deployment with optimized FreeBSD infrastructure and solutions.”
The ThunderX product family is the best in class 64-bit ARMv8 server processor for next generation Data Center and cloud applications. With high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, high memory bandwidth, large memory capacity, integrated hardware accelerators, integrated feature rich high bandwidth network and storage IO, fully virtualized core and IO, and scalable high bandwidth, low latency Ethernet fabric ThunderX enables best in class performance per dollar and performance per watt. The ThunderX™ family includes multiple workload optimized SKUs that enable servers and appliances that are optimized for compute, storage, network and secure compute workloads. The ThunderX processor family is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture specifications as well as ARM’s SBSA and SBBR standards and is widely supported by industry leading OS, Hypervisor and SW tool and application vendors.
