Intel Announces Crystal Forest Platform For Faster Network Traffic

Intel has announced its Crystal Forest chipset and claims that the platform will be able to process ever-growing amounts of data more efficiently.

The chip giant says the scalable platform will lower development costs for equipment manufacturers and provide better network efficiency for service providers. The Crystal Forest platform will help equipment manufacturers and service providers to cope with the explosion of traffic that is expected in the next few years.

Into the forest

According to Intel, Crystal Forest will be able to handle date processing across the network more efficiently and securely and allow for the creation of platforms that can cost-effectively manage this increasing traffic without compromising on performance.

The platform consolidates application, control and packet processing workloads on multi-core Intel architecture processors, which will allow manufacturers to develop a scalable product line that can cope with future performance increases.

The chipset can deliver up to 160 million packets per second, making it possible to send thousands of high-definition videos across each network node. Previously, only ASIC or specialised processors were capable of sending more than 100 million packets per second.

Performance will be further boosted by Intel’s QuickAssist technology which processes and accelerates specialised packet workloads and means that secure Internet transactions can be accelerated by up to 110Gbps, providing the ability to handle these without the cost of specialised solutions.

Intel claims that the platform will enable equipment manufacturers to design more flexible platforms ranging from business firewalls to high-end routers and service providers can make their networks cheaper and easier to manage and maintain by deploying fewer complex platforms.

Increased performance

“The demand for increased network performance will continue to grow as more smart devices connect to the Internet every day,” said Rose Schooler, general manager of Intel’s Communications Infrastructure Division. “And with the popularity of social networking and other high-bandwidth services, such as video and photo uploads/downloads, interactive video, crowdcasting and online gaming, service providers will be challenged to efficiently provision sufficient upstream capacity and manage the spike in network traffic.”

Intel says that its roadmap plans to deliver annual performance refreshes for the next couple of years with the platform scheduled to be released later this year.