In an unusual press release, network processor vendor Cavium has revealed plans for
Project Thunder,” which will develop a family of multi-core SoCs based on the 64-bit ARM v8 processor architecture. The processors will be full-custom cores based on the ARM v8 instruction set architecture (ISA). There are few details of the project, as yet, but the press release and the associated Web page on the Cavium site talk a lot about cloud computing and data centers, so there doesn’t seem to be much question about Project Thunder’s target market. Cavium has plenty of experience with multicore SoC design. The company’s Octeon multicore processor family is based on the MIPS64 ISA with as many as 48 cores in the third-generation family.
