Broadcom Intros 10-GigE C-NIC

IRVINE, Calif. -- Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced the industry's first true single-chip,dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) converged network interface controller (C-NIC) specifically developed for high volume server designs. Leveraging two field proven generations of Broadcom(R) NetXtreme(R) II Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) C-NICs, today's introduction marks an important milestone for Broadcom -- successfully delivering the industry's first fully functional, single-chipC-NIC at 10Gbps (Gigabits per second) rates, with no external memory required. This new device completes the company's portfolio of 10GbE end-to-end solutions featuring market leading C-NICs, switches and physical layer devices (PHYs), enabling OEM partners to enhance next generation servers with a complete portfolio of 10GbE network infrastructure solutions from Broadcom.

In today's enterprise network, a standard server equipped with current Ethernet controller silicon is typically limited to 1Gbps rates. Moving to support a 10 times speed improvement to 10 Gbps rates would require additional support from the host CPU to process the data. This causes significant increase in the amount of processing power CPU would have to dedicate to communication versus its primary duty of running applications.

To address this challenge, Broadcom's new 10GbE C-NIC enables simultaneous processing of network, storage, processor clustering and management traffic on chip while enabling convergence of different traffic types over a single Ethernet fabric. By supporting Microsoft's Windows TCP chimney engine, iSCSI block storage and remote direct memory access (RDMA), the new C-NIC enables network protocol processing on-chip, thereby saving the server's CPU and memory I/O resources to perform their primary tasks - running applications. As a result, IT professionals can simplify their network designs by providing network, storage, clustering and management capabilities over existing and familiar TCP/IP and Ethernet infrastructures while boosting server performance through added network bandwidth and improvements in CPU utilization.

"Enterprise connectivity today is ready for a speed upgrade as the number of GbE ports required to support the server's bandwidth need has increased beyond 4GbE, driven by virtualization and I/O intensive applications running on multi-core CPUs. The market is now ready to adopt 10GbE as the next plateau for industry standard server connectivity with blade servers leading the transition," said Greg Young, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's High-Speed Controller line of business. "The increased bandwidth (to 10GbE) also provides an opportunity to converge disparate networking fabrics (data, storage, management, and processor clustering) by providing sufficient bandwidth for all traffic types. It is expected that most server OEMs will migrate to 10GbE as the new baseline for connectivity."

Broadcom Corp.