Netronome has announced the availability of the NFP-32xx family of NFPs (network flow processors), which combine the NFP's high-performance network, content and security processing with general-purpose processors—such as Intel's IA—through I/O virtualisation. Powered by 40 multi-threaded programmable networking cores running at 1.4GHz, the processor delivers over 56billion instructions per second with 320 hardware threads that optimise memory utilisation, allowing for 1800 instructions per packet at 30 million packets per second. This allows for 20Gbit/s of L2-L7 deep packet processing with line-rate security by embedding hardware acceleration in a programmable dataplane; it also enables I/O virtualisation for millions of simultaneous flows. The NFP operates at 15 to 35W and is fully programmable. Software-defined I/O supports both L2-L3 packet processing and L4-L7 application and content-aware deep packet inspection. To scale network performance to 10Gbit/s and beyond, the processor offers a PCIe v2.0 implementation, including extended SR-IOV with 256 queues to provide assured bandwidth and low-latency access to shared I/O devices. The NFP offers integrated hardware features that make it suitable for parallel programming, including CAM instructions for determining inter-thread dependencies, 44Gbit/s of next-neighbour interconnects and 3Tbit/s of switched internal data bus bandwidth.
