Above: System board with Marvell's Questflo networking chip
Marvell is expanding into a the market for network search engine chips with a product that can juggle 8 million simultaneous streams.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip makers says its new Questflo chip is a search coprocessor that has four times the capacity of other products, but it uses only a third of the electrical power. Using that performance-power efficiency as its edge, Marvell hopes it can grab market as a new entrant against rivals such as Broadcom. The new chip can handle 2.4 billion searches per second, but it only consumes about 25 watts of power.
John Chiang, director of marketing for a business group at Marvell, said in an interview at VentureBeat that the new chip will enable next-generation mobile networks and internet-of-things processing. The internet of things brings smart connectivity to everyday devices.
“Every person is going to have multiple connected wearables,” Chiang said. “We need a network that can support that.”
The Questflo 98TX1100 family of network search coprocessors may not sound sexy. But this kind of chip is what it takes to be able to field communications infrastructure in a city or neighborhood that won’t come to its knees with the added traffic from the addition of everyday things, such as thermostat sensors, to the network. Chiang said the new chips will support mobile devices, the internet of things, and automotive connectivity.
The chip will likely cost in the hundreds of dollars and it could be used by the dozen in network edge routers and data center servers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Specifically, the chip can be used in carrier and enterprise service/edge routers, security appliances, network probes, data center switches, server load-balancers, and new classes of software-defined networks. The chip can handle 8 million flows, where a single flow can be a Netflix movie stream to your home.
While Marvell is new to this market, it makes about seven or so of the other chips that would go into this kind of network box. In that respect, it’s a logical expansion market for Marvell, Chiang said. The device works with Marvell’s Xelerated programmable networks processors, Prestera family of Ethernet packet processors, or any custom networking chips. Marvell argues that the infrastructure built for today’s mobile networks will buckle under the added stress of internet-of-things traffic.
“As next-generation networking equipment adopts new paradigms based on highly flexible and highly scalable flow-based services, Marvell is entering the market as a credible supplier of network search technology. The magnitude of scaling required by these new equipment designs can only be realized using innovative new approaches like that represented by Questflo,” said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst for networking at The Linley Group, which will hold its Linley Tech Processor conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week. Marvell will describe the chip more at the event.
The chip is available in sample quantities now.
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Marvell’s moves into a high-speed networks with a chip that can handle 8M simultaneous streams
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