Q&A: Telecom shifting to x86, IP

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Intel is reaping gains in the transition to telecom networks based on Internet Protocol, but a lack of policies for an industry shifting from voice to data is holding back business.

That's the view of, Fred Kemmerer, chief technology officer of Genband (Plano, Texas). The company makes an array of IP-based telecom systems using a mix of DSPs, network processors and increasingly Intel x86 chips. Kemmerer shared his concerns about technology and regulatory issues driving and holding his company back.

EE Times: What's the shift in silicon at Genband?

Kemmerer: Our overall processor use is more dominated by Intel than network processors.

Most of our heavy lifting in processing packets is now on Intel which is the opposite of classical thinking that says you do non-real-time work on the x86 and use network processors for heavy lifting in deep packet inspection. We find for DPI the Intel silicon with its extra memory provides higher performance than we usually get with NPUs.

NPUs support about a Gbyte of memory, but the latest Intel processors can support hundreds of Gbytes if you want it. And there's no comparison between Intel and NPUs in memory bandwidth and cache performance. The level one and two caches can be as important as external memory in applications with big working sets like call control.

In the last couple generations, Intel has made some great strides in core sizes and clock speeds, and they have gotten ahead of AMD in raw Mips.

EET: Any other technical issues ahead?

Kemmerer: One thing we'd like to see is faster availability of native 40 Gbit/second ATCA boards. If we had that technology available today, we could use it.

There's a good road map for backplanes but we still need the native 40G I/O and fabric boards, and we are looking to see our ATCA partners move quickly. For wireline DPI and wireless LTE applications we need to move data faster than 10G platforms can handle, so these native 40G interfaces are becoming important.

The x86 is dominating NPUs at Genband, said Fred Kemmerer