Cavium Collaborates with Microsoft to Demonstrate ThunderX2 Platform Compliant with Microsoft’s Project Olympus Specifications

Open Compute Project expands platform availability with Cavium’s ThunderX2® ArmV8.1 workload optimized data center server processors

SAN JOSE, CA, March 20, 2018 – Cavium™, Inc., (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking, today announced a major milestone in its collaboration with Microsoft in the Open Compute Community with ThunderX2 Arm^®-based servers demonstrating the Project Olympus Platform.

A live demonstration that includes web applications hosted by a Windows IIS webserver running natively on ThunderX2 based on Microsoft’s Project Olympus platform will be shown at the Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit 2018 in San Jose, CA, at the Cavium booth A37 from March 20^th – 21^st.  The annual Summit brings together more than 3,000 key decision makers, executives, engineers, developers and suppliers. Together, they help grow, drive and support the open hardware ecosystem in, near and around the data center and beyond.

The ThunderX2 product family is Cavium's second generation 64-bit Armv8-A server processor SoC for data center, cloud and high-performance computing applications. The family integrates fully out-of-order high-performance custom cores supporting single and dual socket configurations. ThunderX2 is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple workload optimized SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as Arm's SBSA and SBBR standards. It is also widely supported by industry-leading operating system, hypervisor and software tool and application vendors.

Cavium and Microsoft originally announced their collaboration at the OCP U.S. Summit in March 2017, where the two companies demonstrated cloud service workloads developed for Microsoft’s internal use running on ThunderX2-based server platform.  This was followed in November 2017 with the additional announcement of the companies releasing the detailed specification of ThunderX2 server motherboard for Microsoft’s Project Olympus including block diagram, management sub-system, power management, FPGA card support, IO connectors, and physical specifications.

“Today’s demonstration is another key milestone in the collaboration between Microsoft and Cavium to drive Armv8-based workload enablement and optimization in Microsoft’s Project Olympus,” said Dr. Leendert van Doorn, Distinguished Engineer, Azure, Microsoft Corp. “Our collective commitment to the OCP community along with exciting platform innovation is the type of leadership our customers and partners have come to expect.  Working with Cavium to bring ThunderX2 to Project Olympus continues to demonstrate this leadership.”

“We are very excited to expand our collaboration with Microsoft to demonstrate the first dual socket 64-bit Armv8-A OCP platform  with ThunderX2,” said Gopal Hegde, Vice President & General Manager of the Data Center Processor Group, Cavium. “ThunderX2 continues to demonstrate the features and performance required by the most compute and IO intensive applications in the data center.” 

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Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM) offers a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching, connectivity, and baseband processing. Cavium’s highly integrated multi-core SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise, Data Center and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application stacks, hardware-reference designs, and other products. Cavium is headquartered in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India, Israel, China, and Taiwan. For more information about the Company, please visit: http://www.cavium.com/. 

Media Contact
Angel Atondo
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Cavium, Inc.
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com