ThunderX2® Dual Socket Platform Adds Support for Oracle Linux

Cavium™ and Oracle collaborate on Oracle Linux preview for Arm®v8.1 architecture

SAN JOSE, CA, May 7, 2018 – Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking, today announced ThunderX2 platform support for Oracle Linux. Cavium and Oracle have collaborated on the development program, which includes contributions to the open source community. The initial Oracle Linux 7 developer preview release extends the thriving software ecosystem for Cavium’s ThunderX2 product family. A live demonstration of the Oracle Linux 7 preview with MySQL running on a dual ThunderX2 platform was shown at OCP US Summit 2018 in March 2018.

The ThunderX2 product family is Cavium's second generation 64-bit Arm^®v8-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.

Oracle Linux 7 is engineered for open cloud infrastructure and delivers leading performance, scalability, and reliability for enterprise SaaS and PaaS workloads as well as traditional enterprise applications.Oracle Linux 7 is available as a developer preview release for Cavium’s ThunderX2 platform and is packaged as an ISO image that can be used for standard installation.Software downloads, supporting documentation and additional product information are available from the Oracle website.

To support this engineering collaboration, Cavium has directly delivered key open source software contributions that are particularly targeted for compute-specific applications, such as optimizations for GCC and LLVM, as well as critical kernel support into kernel.org for enablement of ThunderX2.Many third-party commercial software partners are developing and optimizing their applications for ThunderX2 to include development tools and environments, storage and segment specific applications.  Cavium continues to contribute reference systems for build, test, optimization and validation activities.

“Oracle and Cavium continue to make good progress supporting the Armv8-A architecture with Oracle Linux,” said Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President, Operating Systems and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle.

“Teaming with Oracle has provided a tremendous opportunity to further expand our software ecosystem,” said Gopal Hegde, Vice President & General Manager of the Data Center Processor Group, Cavium. “This collaboration can help accelerate the development and deployment of critical applications to mainstream data center and cloud end users with a range of configuration and performance requirements that Oracle Linux and ThunderX2 are uniquely designed to address.”

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About Cavium

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
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Cavium, Inc.
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com

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