Enea Announces Bare Metal Performance Tools for Cavium OCTEON® Family of Multicore Processors
STOCKHOLM, Sweden and SAN JOSE, California, January 18, 2012 – Enea® (NASDAQ: OMX, Nordic:ENEA) and Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM) today announced that the Enea® Bare Metal Performance (BMP) Tools will now support Cavium OCTEON® multicore processors. The IP packet processing market is growing exponentially with applications in networking equipment, telecommunications infrastructure (4G LTE), security services, and data centers to name a few. This market is driven by ever increasing high-bandwidth requirements where throughput and system performance optimization determines industry winners. Enea’s BMP Tools (www.enea.com/bmptools) ensure that equipment manufacturers can quickly and visually optimize the performance of their products.
Cavium OCTEON multicore processors support a large number of real general-purpose cores, each of which can run either Linux or a “bare metal platform” like Cavium’s Simple Executive, whereby a given processor core executes in a “run-to-completion” mode with minimal overhead and maximum processing bandwidth. Enea BMP Tools allow for easier optimization of bare metal applications by giving developers deep graphical visibility into system behavior and performance without adding additional processing overhead. The result is more highly tuned, optimized, and reliable applications.
"As the innovator and leader in the development of bare metal tools for multicore applications we are pleased to be working with Cavium to deliver solutions that will immediately accelerate the development process for our joint customers,” said Karl Mörner, VP of Software Products at Enea. “The Cavium OCTEON multicore processor family has been widely adopted and provides strong performance characteristics. We look forward to helping developers get the most out of these devices.”
“Enea’s Bare Metal Performance Tools combined with the market-leading Cavium OCTEON multicore processors offer manufacturers of high-performance data plane equipment a compelling solution,” said YJ Kim, General Manager, Infrastructure Processor Group at Cavium, Inc. “In the packet processing business high performance is essential and the BMP Tools provide true visualization and help developers get greater throughput from their applications.”
Enea BMP Tools consists of an Eclipse-based host tools suite called Enea® Optima, a set of run time libraries and agents for profiling and logging data collection, and an IPC (Interprocess Communications) mechanism called Enea® LINX for transport of the collected data to the Optima host tool, or to an external file for later analysis.
Enea BMP Tools provide three types of services: software profiling, application profiling, and logging/tracing. Software profiling helps developers optimize a slow performing application by visualizing runtime hardware constraints caused by the non-optimized source code. Enea BMP Tools provide two types of performance visualization tools targeting source code profiling and application profiling. Source code profiling identifies at the source code level where constraints such as pipeline stalls, TLB misses and cache misses are causing sub-optimal performance, by matching these hardware events/counters to the source code at any level of the application function call tree, even down to individual lines of code in any given function. This includes overall CPU utilization of any function or line of code. Application profiling creates and analyzes application software level statistics with the purpose of profiling the applications overall performance and behavior. Such statistics could be idle time, throughput statistics, extraneous hardware events, or any other user defined statistics that makes sense to the application.
With the Enea BMP Tools log/trace facility, both text and binary log information may be collected in a single circular buffer that may be extracted either continuously or by discreet command. Log data may be forwarded directly to the host Optima tools suite for analysis or to an external termination point (file system) for later analysis. Log data may also be extracted “post mortem” after a crash to help debug the cause of the crash. Logging and tracing tools are useful for identification of faults, system bottlenecks, and otherwise extraneous behavior in order to increase the reliability of the application as designed.
BMP Tools are useful at most stages of the software development life cycle, from initial software system testing on the target hardware platform through full system integration, test and verification, and even in field deployment. Evaluation copies are available (contact local Enea sales representative) and pricing starts at $25K for developer licenses.
Enea’s BMP Tools will initially support the OCTEON Plus family of multicore processors with follow-on support for OCTEON II and are available immediately.
About Cavium
Cavium is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in networking, communications and the digital home. Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software compatible processors ranging in performance from 10 Mbps to over 40 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access & service provider equipment. Cavium’s processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium’s principal offices are in San Jose, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India, Taiwan and China. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com
Note on Forward-Looking Statements
This press release may contain forward-looking statements regarding future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions and current expectations. Our actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include but are not limited to the rate of new design wins, the rate at which existing design wins go into production, the timing of purchases by Cavium’s customers, acceptance by customers of Cavium’s new product introductions, whether or not the company can continue to expand gross margins and operating margins, pricing pressures, general economic conditions, manufacturing difficulties, and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Cavium’s business are set forth in the “Risk Factors” section of our Form 10Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 5, 2011. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof and qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and we assume no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements.