Cavium Inc. has used the flexibility of its multicore processor architecture to expand from security and networking applications to a wide variety of specialized markets.  At the Computex show in Taiwan, Cavium is launching a brand-new video processor family, PureVu, based on an emerging Wi-Fi display standard called WFD.  The new CNW66xx family also supports Cavium’s own WiVu protocol.

Cavium first entered 1080p video processor markets with the CNW5xxx processor.  The new PureVu processor features a video engine capable of decoding up to 1920x1080p30/i60, to meet such standards as MPEG2, MPEG4, and H.260.  The SoC chip that includes the video engine also integrates an ARM core, an audio DSP with dedicated DMA engine, a display processor with multi-layer alpha compositor, and a video post-processor with a 3D motion adaptive de-interlacer.

The interfaces on the chip include four independent video DACs, an HDMI 1.3 transmitter, a 10/100 Ethernet MAC, USB 2.0, and such high-speed serial interfaces as UART, SPI, and I2C.  The processors, distinguished by different memory, performance, and package options, include features proprietary to Cavium such as Super Low Latency and a smart Quality of Service rate adaptation technology.

Cavium also announced at Computex that ZyXEL will be using the Octeon processor from Cavium for a range of security gateways and Unified Threat Management appliances.  Cavium also will work with Caswell Inc. to develop blade servers for cloud computing that will integrate up to 1000 Octeon processors in scalable rack-mounted arrays.