Multicore Packet Processing Forum

Posts Tagged ‘packet processing’

By Eric Carmes – 6WIND Founder and CEO

It has surely not escaped the attention of everybody that Intel plans to re-enter the race to provide solutions for networking infrastructure.

As explained by Rajesh Gadiyar, Director of Architecture, Communications Infrastructure Division, Intel in his presentation “Using Intel Processors and Data-Plane Processing” at the Linley Processor Conference last week, Intel architectures were historically not considered for this market segment because:

• Myth1: Intel architecture is not suitable for packet processing,
• Myth2: Intel architecture performance is not good for small packets (64 Bytes).

Intel has now demonstrated that their new multicore architecture processors are able to achieve superior packet processing performance, using the Intel DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit). The DPDK software provides APIs for efficient memory management and packet handling as well as optimized poll mode drivers.

A high performance packet processing solution on x86 architectures will certainly compete with other available solutions in applications such as mobile infrastructure. It also provides an interesting solution for overcoming the I/O performance bottlenecks in data centers where the x86 architecture is dominant.

As also explained by Rajesh in his presentation, 6WIND has been working with Intel to integrate the 6WINDGate packet processing solution with the Intel DPDK software. Thanks to the generic 6WINDGate architecture, network equipment developers can now benefit from the complete data plane solution including more than 30 protocols (not only basic features such as IP forwarding). 6WINDGate is available for any embedded Linux distribution and can be easily integrated with existing software as Linux APIs are fully preserved.