Marvell Octeon 10 data plane processors begin sampling from TSMC 5nm fabs, bringing advanced-node DPU silicon to market.

Marvell has produced samples of the Octeon 10, a server microprocessor with up to 24 Arm-compatible cores designed for applications involving artificial intelligence and network management. These chips are part of the Octeon family and Marvell refers to them as data processing units (DPUs). "We are sampling Octeon silicon to our customers and they're working to bring their products to market next year," a spokeswoman said. Data processing units are specialized accelerators to which CPU cores can offload routine but intensive work, such as network packet processing, data encryption and compression, and AI inference and training, also known as SmartNICs. The Octeon 10 could be used to process data at the edge of 5G wireless networks as well as perform packet filtering and machine-learning tasks.

The Octeon 10 faces competition from Nvidia's BlueField-3 data processing unit, which features up to 16 Arm Cortex-A78 CPU cores plus 16 programmable accelerator cores with 256 execution threads total as well as PCIe and Ethernet connectivity. Nvidia announced that Lenovo was being included in VMware's Project Monterey program, an effort to redesign servers with technologies including Bluefield DPUs. In comparison, Marvell claimed the Octeon 10 is three times faster and draws 50 per cent less power than its predecessor, the Octeon TX2.

The Octeon 10 features machine-learning and cryptography acceleration units, packet parsers, and supports DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 interconnects plus Ethernet up to 400G, depending on the SKU. The 2.5GHz CPU cores use Arm's Neoverse N2 design, which was introduced earlier this year. Marvell claimed the chip is the first 5nm server-class accelerator of its kind and will be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) on its 5nm node.

Marvell also hopes to produce chips for data centers and 5G kit using TSMC's 3nm node, incorporating new technologies for faster connections between multiple dies in a package. TSMC plans to fabricate mobile and data-center parts in volume on 3nm in the latter-half of next year. Additionally, Marvell unveiled the Prestera DX 7321 Ethernet switch, also made using a 5nm process, designed to facilitate faster data transfers along the back-end of 5G infrastructure and supports OpenRAN, an industry-wide open hardware and software effort to decouple and widen the 5G network infrastructure.