Adding
more and faster general-purpose processors to routers, switches and
other networking equipment can improve performance but adds to system
costs and power demands while doing little to address latency, a major
cause of performance problems in networks.
By contrast, smart silicon minimizes or eliminates performance choke points by reducing latency for specific processing tasks.
In
2013 and beyond, design engineers will increasingly deploy smart
silicon to achieve the benefits of its order of magnitude higher
performance and greater efficiencies in cost and power.
Enterprise Networks
In
the past, Moore's Law was sufficient to keep pace with increasing
computing and networking workloads. Hardware and software largely
advanced in lockstep: as processor performance increased, more
sophisticated features could be added in software.
These parallel
improvements made it possible to create more abstracted software,
enabling much higher functionality to be built more quickly and with
less programming effort.
Today, however, these layers of abstraction are making it difficult to perform more complex tasks with adequate performance.
General-purpose
processors, regardless of their core count and clock rate, are too slow
for functions such as classification, cryptographic security and
traffic management that must operate deep inside each and every packet.
What's more, these specialized functions must often be performed
sequentially, restricting the opportunity to process them in parallel in
multiple cores.
By contrast, these and other specialized types
of processing are ideal applications for smart silicon, and it is
increasingly common to have multiple intelligent acceleration engines
integrated with multiple cores in specialized System-on-Chip (SoC)
communications processors.
The number of function-specific
acceleration engines available continues to grow, and shrinking
geometries now make it possible to integrate more engines onto a single
SoC.
It is even possible to integrate a system vendor's unique
intellectual property as a custom acceleration engine within an SoC.
Taken together, these advances make it possible to replace multiple SoCs
with a single SoC to enable faster, smaller, more power-efficient
networking architectures.
Storage Networks
The biggest
bottleneck in datacenters today is caused by the five orders of
magnitude difference in I/O latency between main memory in servers (100
nanoseconds) and traditional hard disk drives (10 milliseconds).
Latency
to external storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage
(NAS) is even higher because of the intervening network and performance
restrictions resulting when a single resource services multiple,
simultaneous requests sequentially in deep queues.
Caching
content to memory in a server or in a SAN on a Dynamic RAM (DRAM) cache
appliance is a proven technique for reducing latency and thereby
improving application-level performance.
But today, because the
amount of memory possible in a server or cache appliance (measured in
gigabytes) is only a small fraction of the capacity of even a single
disk drive (measured in terabytes), the performance gains achievable
from traditional caching are insufficient to deal with the data deluge.
Advances
in NAND flash memory and flash storage processors, combined with more
intelligent caching algorithms, break through the traditional caching
scalability barrier to make caching an effective, powerful and
cost-efficient way to accelerate application performance going forward.
Solid
state storage is ideal for caching as it offers far lower latency than
hard disk drives with comparable capacity. Besides delivering higher
application performance, caching enables virtualized servers to perform
more work, cost-effectively, with the same number of software licenses.
Solid
state storage typically produces the highest performance gains when the
flash cache is placed directly in the server on the PCIe® bus.
Intelligent caching software is used to place hot, or most frequently
accessed, data in low-latency flash storage.
The hot data is
accessible quickly and deterministically under any workload since there
is no external connection, no intervening network to a SAN or NAS and no
possibility of associated traffic congestion and delay.
Exciting
to those charged with managing or analyzing massive data inflows, some
flash cache acceleration cards now support multiple terabytes of solid
state storage, enabling the storage of entire databases or other
datasets as hot data.
Mobile Networks
Traffic volume in
mobile networks is doubling every year, driven mostly by the explosion
of video applications. Per-user access bandwidth is also increasing by
an order of magnitude from around 100 Mb/s in 3G networks to 1 Gb/s in
4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced networks, which will in turn lead
to the advent of even more graphics-intensive, bandwidth-hungry
applications.
Base stations must rapidly evolve to manage rising
network loads. In the infrastructure multiple radios are now being used
in cloud-like distributed antenna systems and network topologies are
flattening.
Operators are planning to deliver advanced quality of
service with location-based services and application-aware billing. As
in the enterprise, increasingly handling these complex, real-time tasks
is only feasible by adding acceleration engines built into smart
silicon.
To deliver higher 4G data speeds reliably to a growing
number of mobile devices, access networks need more, and smaller, cells
and this drives the need for the deployment of SoCs in base stations.
Reducing
component count with SoCs has another important advantage: lower power
consumption. From the edge to the core, power consumption is now a
critical factor in all network infrastructures.
Enterprise
networks, datacenter storage architectures and mobile network
infrastructures are in the midst of rapid, complex change. The best and
possibly only way to efficiently and cost-effectively address these
changes and harness the opportunities of the data deluge is by adopting
smart silicon solutions that are emerging in many forms to meet the
challenges of next-generation networks.
The
Samsung Galaxy S5 has a level of hype around it usually reserved for
Apple products and a side effect of that is that there are enough rumors
and leaks surrounding it to bury a small country.
Sony
loves a flagship smartphone and, if current rumors ring true, the
Japanese firm is lining up its third in just over a year in the form of
the Sony Xperia Z2.
