networkZONE Products for the week of July 30, 2007
Green Hills Software Inc Says…
Complete Product Suite for Cavium Networks OCTEON Multi-Core MIPS64 Processor Family
Enables rapid product deployment for network equipment providers using OCTEON processors
Green Hills Software, Inc. has announced that the Green Hills product suite supports Cavium Networks’ OCTEON Multi-core MIPS64 processor family. This support includes the MULTI integrated development environment, TimeMachine tool suite, Green Hills compilers, DoubleCheck static analysis tools, µ-velOSity royalty-free real-time operating system and Green Hills Probe which are now available for the OCTEON family of multi-core MIPS64 processors. The Green Hills products enable network equipment providers to reduce their cost of software development and significantly shorten the time-to-market for their networking, security, control plane, wireless, storage and broadband gateway applications, based on the market leading OCTEON processors.
“Green Hills Software is a welcome addition to the Cavium Networks ecosystem,” said Rajiv Khemani, vice president of marketing and sales at Cavium Networks. “Their software solutions for multicore processor development are being used by our common customers in the wireless infrastructure market. This portfolio of tools and operating systems optimized for the OCTEON processors allows rapid deployment of leading performance networking products,” he said.
Green Hills’ products for the OCTEON processor family come from 25 years of experience providing development tools and RTOSes that make it easy for software developers to utilize the silicon’s optimizations, while reducing their time-to-market and improving the quality and security of code running in the end product.
This portfolio includes:
- MULTI integrated development environment – the industry’s leading integrated development environment for multi-core development and debugging with many standard features for finding software bugs early in the development process
- TimeMachine tool suite – the revolutionary back-in-time tool suite that gives embedded software developers unprecedented visibility to see and fix software flaws
- DoubleCheck static analysis tool – seamlessly integrated with MULTI to allow easy, rapid analysis of your code, finding bugs before they have a chance to infest your target
- Green Hills C/C++compilers for the OCTEON MIPS64 core – numerous optimizations designed to exploit the core’s characteristics to generate the fastest and smallest code in the industry
- µ-velOSity real-time operating system – providing industry-leading performance, minimal memory (less than 1.6 KB) and power-saving footprint for resource-constrained and cost-sensitive devices
- Green Hills Probe – providing reliable and efficient multi-core debugging using the OCTEON EJTAG port
“We are seeing the rapid adoption of multi-core, multifunction microprocessors in next-generation wired and wireless infrastructure equipment,” commented Dan O’Dowd, founder and chief executive officer of Green Hills Software. “Cavium Networks’ OCTEON product family is leading the way by capturing a significant number of future designs and deployments by a wide variety of OEM networking and storage equipment providers. Now, with the Green Hills solution available, these OEM’s can realize their performance goals while delivering on their time-to-market targets,” he said.
EN-Genius Says…
It’s very exciting to see some third-party software tool support for one of my favorite network processors -- especially when it’s the extensive and powerful series of development, analysis and debug products that Green Hills offers. By extending their extensive support for multi-core architectures and powerful Time Machine debug capabilities to support Cavium’s unique architecture, they’ve made OCTEON’s powerful features much easier to use and incorporate into your next application. I’d expect this auspicious pairing to significantly expand Cavium’s user base as well as the range of applications their chips get used in.
Here’s why: for one thing, this auspicious pairing gives Cavium and their developer community a powerful collection of OS software and tools whose development costs probably far exceeds the substantial investments that went into the chips themselves. I’ve reviewed many of Cavium’s products (see my October 2006 review for an example) and have always given them high points for their silicon but, as with most network/application processors, worried a bit about whether their in-house software tools were sufficient to allow the average developer to exploit the architecture’s full power. While Cavium development tools are certainly some of the better ones offered by an NP manufacturer, they still lack the many bells and whistles that programmers expect, and need, to create the complex software running in today’s advanced networking equipment. I suspect that’s one of the big reasons that Cavium, and every other semi-custom processor on the market today, relies heavily on near-turnkey application-specific reference designs to get risk-averse designers to use their parts.
Having a standards-compliant IDE and the rest of the Green Hills portfolio behind them should help Cavium free many of its customers from the constraints of these cookie-cutter reference designs and attract many new customers who, at least until now, shied away from the challenges of clean-sheet development projects with these complex little processors.
Even the short chunk of hands-on time I got with Green Hills multi-core IDE while I was at the Freescale Technology Forum this Spring makes it easy for me to see how much easier writing and debugging code for the Cavium architecture will be now. In addition to providing a separate code development window for each core, the suites back-end features that coordinate firmware loads and processor resources should help dramatically accelerate programmer productivity and eliminate many of the common sources of coding errors. I had an even shorter time to watch their Time Machine tool suite in action but even my brief exposure to the deep visibility it gives you into how your system’s code is actually working (almost) makes me sad I’m not actually writing software for embedded systems anymore. There are at least two projects in my dim past where a tool like that would have saved weeks of painful debug labor with the primitive tools we had on hand at the time.
The Green Hills Software solution for the CN38xx and CN58xx processors is available today.
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