Intel’s Crystal Forest Server to Improve Performance, Security of Networks

From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp. on Tuesday today disclosed several features for the company's next-generation communications platform, code-named "Crystal Forest”. The platform will handle data processing across the network more efficiently and securely, while addressing the specialized needs for handling cloud connectivity and content processing.

Currently, equipment manufacturers must combine a variety of highly specialized silicon co-processors with different software programming models to handle multiple communications workloads when building platforms for a scalable network – a very complex and expensive endeavor. With Crystal Forest, equipment manufacturers will be able to consolidate three communications workloads - application, control and packet processing - on multi-core Intel architecture processors to deliver better performance and accelerate time to market. They can also develop a scalable product line based on multiple Intel processor options to plan for future performance increases.

Intel Crystal Forest platform relies on industry-standard Intel Xeon microprocessors (based on Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge cores) with TDP and temperature-related tweaks. The Crystal Forest also sports a special companion chip (co-processor) that handles compression, crypto and packet processing, all the critical features of today's web and cloud servers. Intel's new platform will support Linux and FreeBSD initially with Windows support incoming in the future.

Intel's next-generation communications platform, Crystal Forest, is expected to deliver up to 160 million packets per second performance for Layer 3 packet forwarding, making it possible to send thousands of high-definition videos across each network node. Previously, only ASIC or specialized processors were capable of sending more than 100 million packets per second. The Intel data plane development kit (DPDK), a set of software libraries and algorithms, improves the performance and throughput of packets on Intel architecture platforms to yield more than five times the performance over previous generations of Intel platforms.

"The demand for increased network performance will continue to grow as more smart devices connect to the Internet every day. And with the popularity of social networking and other high-bandwidth services, such as video and photo uploads/downloads, interactive video, crowdcasting and online gaming, service providers will be challenged to efficiently provision sufficient upstream capacity and manage the spike in network traffic," said Rose Schooler, general manager of Intel's Communications Infrastructure Division.

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