SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 7, 2012) - Cavium, Inc., (NASDAQ: [ CAVM ]), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, and the digital home, announced today its state-of-the art [ OCTEON® III ] MIPS64 family of 1 - 48 core multi-core processors that deliver over 100Gbps of application performance per chip, and allow for linear scaling across multiple chips in a fully coherent fashion. The 2.5GHz OCTEON III processors provide the most compute power of any standards-based communications processor chip, at an unmatched 120GHz of 64-bit compute processing per chip. OCTEON III delivers up to 4X higher application performance than the market-leading [ OCTEON II ] with significantly superior performance per watt. Furthermore, OCTEON III is the industry's first SoC to integrate best-in-class high-performance search processing leveraged from Cavium's [ NEURON™ Search ] processors along with market-leading 5^th generation DPI Acceleration, dramatically reducing BOM cost and power. Cavium's OCTEON family is the industry's #1 embedded multi-core processor line designed into enterprise, data center and service provider equipment including routers, switches, appliances, 3G/4G wireless base stations, RNCs, xGSNs, evolved packet core, services gateways, DPI equipment, storage switches and intelligent server adapters.

Providers of Next-Generation Networks are being challenged to handle the explosive increase in traffic because of the fast adoption of cloud technology and mobile broadband, as well as increased exchange of multimedia and video rich content. Higher traffic coupled with the need for intelligent application-aware and secure processing has shifted the bottleneck for L3 - L7 data and security services to CPU processing that requires an unprecedented level of 64-bit CPU GHz processing power and dedicated hardware acceleration. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), by the end of 2015, annual global IP traffic will increase four-fold from 2010, reaching 966 Exabytes per year and mobile traffic will increase 26-fold.

Additionally, "The Internet of Things or Devices" is growing rapidly. According to GSMA, the global mobile industry trade group, and other analysts, the number of internet connected devices will increase from 9 billion in 2011 to over 20 billion by 2020, and could potentially reach 50 billion, accelerating the migration to IPv6 and generating massive amounts of data traffic.

Supporting Analyst and Company Quotes
"Cavium is the fastest growing embedded multi-core processor company, and Cavium's flagship OCTEON II 32-core processor was selected for the Linley Group Analyst's Choice award as [ Best Embedded Processor of 2011 ]," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group and editor-in-chief of the Microprocessor Report. "With OCTEON III, Cavium has made impressive advances in performance, process technology, unique search-processing acceleration and multi-chip scalability. The new processor should provide customers with leading-edge application performance, superior integration and attractive low power for next-generation systems."

"Cavium's proven track record in delivering industry leading multi-core processors and superior software solutions across three generations has enabled us to achieve a wide customer following. With the new OCTEON III family we are leapfrogging both ourselves and our competition in scalability, performance and integration, while maintaining full backward compatibility with previous OCTEON processors," said Syed Ali, President and CEO at Cavium. "OCTEON III will enable customers to build highly differentiated systems at performance levels that were simply not possible previously."

To enable breakthrough data performance and application capabilities in a cost and power efficient manner, Cavium OCTEON III processors provide unparalleled compute coupled with superior integration of application acceleration and next-generation I/Os, within tightly constrained power envelopes.

OCTEON™ III Family Highlights

• New cnMIPS64 III cores with up to 120GHz of Compute - Up to 48 superscalar MIPS64 cores, operating at up to 2.5GHz. Cavium's third generation custom cnMIPS "Real Cores" include core-architecture enhancements, larger caches and short, efficient pipelines to deliver lower-latency, greater determinism and superior performance/watt than alternative "Pseudo-Core" solutions.
• New 20+ Tbps HyperConnect - Provides high-performance access to a large, highly associative L2 cache running at full core-frequency which results in OCTEON III delivering substantially lower latency for packet processing when compared to three level cache architectures that typically operate at a fraction of core-frequency.
• Revolutionary, Low Latency Coherency Architecture enables Multi socket designs - Enables multiple OCTEON III chips to appear as a single logical high-performance processor with up to 384 cores, providing up to 960GHz compute, up to 800+ Gbps of application performance and up to 2 Terabytes of memory capacity at a dramatically lower latency versus alternative solutions. Traffic arriving at any chip can be processed by any other chip, without the data first having to be written to the local memory of the first chip, which enables superior throughput and lower latency.
• Integrated NEURON Search - Industry's first SoC to integrate high-performance search processing leveraged from Cavium's NEURON Search processors, dramatically reducing BOM cost and power, with unprecedented flexibility and capacity.
• Best-In-Class, Proven Hardware Acceleration engines - Over 500 dedicated hardware engines for packet processing, quality of service (QoS), security, compression and deep packet inspection.
  • Highest L2 - L7 Packet Processing including hardware acceleration of packet forwarding, IPsec, Security, TCP and DPI applications at up to 100+Gbps in a single chip
  • Highest Compression/Decompression performance of up to 50+Gbps in a single chip
• Broad support for latest high-capacity I/Os and memory
  • Over 500Gbps of I/O connectivity per chip - interfaces include multiple ports of 40G, 20G, 10G, GE, Interlaken, Interlaken/LA, SRIO, PCIe Gen3, SATA 6G and USB 3.0
  • Glue-less connectivity to Cavium NEURON Search and NITROX^® Processors
  • On chip 4x 72b DDR3/4 memory controllers delivering over 600Gbps of memory bandwidth
• Innovative PowerMin™ power saving technology
  • Highly granular power management technology provides up to 4X Performance per Watt compared to the market leading OCTEON II product family

Software
OCTEON III is accompanied by Cavium's market leading software development kit (SDK), hardened APIs and software stacks for a variety of networking, security and storage applications. Cavium's SDK has dramatically simplified multi-core development by providing support for standard operating systems, GNU tool-chains, C/C++ based software applications, advanced debugging/profiling tools such as Oprofile, Valgrind, Cachegrind and production quality APIs and software stacks.

Multi-core Partnership to Accelerate Customer End-Solutions (PACE)
OCTEON III is supported by Cavium's huge ecosystem of over 100 [ PACE ]™ partners who deliver optimized OCTEON multi-core solutions across operating systems, development tools, applications, middleware and a wide range of hardware platforms.

Availability
Hardware design collateral is available now. First 28nm OCTEON III silicon is expected to sample in the second half of 2012. Please contact your Cavium representative for additional details.

About Cavium, Inc
Cavium is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in networking, communications and the digital home. Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software compatible processors ranging in performance from 10 Mbps to over 100 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access & service provider equipment. Cavium's processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium's principal offices are in San Jose, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India, Taiwan and China. For more information, please visit: [ http://www.cavium.com ]

Note on Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions and current expectations. Our actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include but are not limited to the quality and performance of our products; the timely and efficient completion of process design and transfer to manufacturing, assembly and test processes; product developments by our competitors; the rate at which our new products are adopted; rate of new design wins; technological advances; manufacturing difficulties; development of new products and technologies; whether Cavium is successful in marketing its products; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Cavium's business are set forth in the "Risk Factors" section of our Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on November, 4, 2011. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof and qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and we assume no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements.