Abstract

EZchip Technologies commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate its NP-1c, a second-generation 10-Gigabit network processor that supports 10-Gigabit or multi 1-Gigabit configurations through an SPI4.2 interface with 16 channel granularity, enabling support of up to 16 1-Gigabit ports through an Ethernet aggregator.

Tolly Group engineers measured the IPv4, IPv6, MPLS and DiffServ performance of the NP-1c chipset using The Linley Group and Network Processor Forum (NPF) benchmark specifications (LinleyBenchmarkTM 2002, NPF IP Forwarding Application-Level Benchmark Implementation Agreement Rev. 1.6. and NPF MPLS Forwarding Application Level Benchmark Implementation Agreement Rev. 1.0) The goal was to validate EZchip claims of wire-speed traffic forwarding across a variety of frame sizes in a variety of different test scenarios specified in the above three benchmark specifications for IPv4, IPv6 and MPLS traffic.

Tests of EZchip’s NP-1c prove that the network processor offers wire-speed performance in a 10-Gigabit Ethernet environment under all tested configurations. The NP-1c was capable of forwarding up to 20 Gbps of traffic in a full-duplex configuration, when tested under NPF and Linley Group benchmark specs