Marvell Announces New OCTEON TX2 + OCTEON Fusion CPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Marvell Announces New OCTEON TX2 + OCTEON Fusion CPUs

Marvell today announced the new OCTEON Fusion processors and a new line in the OCTEON TX2 family...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Marvell-OCTEON-TX2-FUSION

[cybertraveler]

"improved security co-processors"

IMO the biggest "security" co-processor improvement would be the addition of a little eject button on the side of the chip that allows the user to launch the "security" co-processor into the sky

Hmmm... maybe these C-Sky processors will have this feature. The "C" must be for "co-processor"

[CommunityMember]

"improved security co-processors"

IMO the biggest "security" co-processor improvement would be the addition of a little eject button on the side of the chip that allows the user to launch the "security" co-processor into the sky

No one forces you to use the hardware crypto engines, but doing ipsec at 100Gb/s is going to require you to get a much bigger processor if you insist on doing it in software.

[NotMine999]

"improved security co-processors"

IMO the biggest "security" co-processor improvement would be the addition of a little eject button on the side of the chip that allows the user to launch the "security" co-processor into the sky

Hmmm... maybe these C-Sky processors will have this feature. The "C" must be for "co-processor"

I hope your tinfoil hat uses extra strength aluminum foil.

[stormcrow]

"improved security co-processors"

IMO the biggest "security" co-processor improvement would be the addition of a little eject button on the side of the chip that allows the user to launch the "security" co-processor into the sky

Hmmm... maybe these C-Sky processors will have this feature. The "C" must be for "co-processor"

I think your Faraday cage hat is on too tight.

While you might be somewhat justified with "security processors" like AMD's Trust Zone that are essentially black boxes somewhat cloaked in secrecy, the Octeon system co-processors aren't any different in concept than the custom AES-NI security processor instructions in an Intel Core or AMD Ryzen CPU. They accelerate the calculations for SSL/TLS, certificate, encryption parts of network traffic. You know... security calculations. Same concept as offloading TCP/IP loads to higher end NICs.

It is unfortunate that media companies have managed to conflate actual security with heavy handed data restrictions in the public mind.

[Ardje]

While you might be somewhat justified with "security processors" like AMD's Trust Zone that are essentially black boxes somewhat cloaked in secrecy, the Octeon system co-processors aren't any different in concept than the custom AES-NI security processor instructions in an Intel Core or AMD Ryzen CPU. They accelerate the calculations for SSL/TLS, certificate, encryption parts of network traffic. You know... security calculations. Same concept as offloading TCP/IP loads to higher end NICs.

A proper term for that is a crypto engine, crypto offload or crypto copro, not a security processor, as it does nothing with security as you describe it. Crypto is just dedicated/"hardware implemented" math of certain formulas. Crypto is not just for encryption, but hashing might actually be interesting for tables, where you want to prevent a potential collision as much as possible. Although I doubt they will use a dedicated engine to calculate the hash of a filename.
Or they might actually have some security things embedded and it might be more than a crypto engine, but even their announcement says it's nothing more than crypto.
Ah, it's just a marketing term. Call it security, and we can sell it.

[torsionbar28]

Like stormcrow said, it's just a math accelerator. No different from MMX or SSE instructions. Instead of accelerating the calculations used in audio/video operations, these are accelerating the math used in cryptography. Tinfoil not required.

[coder]

Third paragraph:

The new OCTEON TX2 for network infrastructure and more ranges from four to 36 core ARMv8 SoCs.

The new OCTEON TX2 SoCs, for network infrastructure and more, ranges from 4 to 36 ARMv8 cores.

[cybertraveler]

If their "security" co-processor really is just for accelerating cryptographic algorithms, then it's odd that they would use such a general word "security" co-processor, as that's the same name that Intel and AMD use to market their secretive co-processors, which are widely tolerated but undesirable to people in Open Source / security / hacker communities.

It's plausible to me that it's just marketing people that named it that way because they thought people wouldn't know what a "cryptographic-accelerator" is (or wouldn't be able to guess).

There's a couple of you in this thread who are strange ones. I guess you're the slave-minded type. Plenty of those about.

[starshipeleven]

If their "security" co-processor really is just for accelerating cryptographic algorithms, then it's odd that they would use such a general word "security" co-processor, as that's the same name that Intel and AMD use to market their secretive co-processors

It's actually the other way around. Crypto accelerators and TPM have been called "security" or "secure" coprocessors or "hardware security module" well before the ME and PSP were a thing.
see here for example a server-grade high power crypto accelerator card module thing https://www.ibm.com/security/cryptocards

In other words, it's ME and PSP that give a bad name to "security coprocessors" by adding bs functionality that didn't belong.

It's plausible to me that it's just marketing people that named it that way because they thought people wouldn't know what a "cryptographic-accelerator" is (or wouldn't be able to guess).

Yes. "Cryptographic" is too nerdy term for the suits, they need simpler and dumbed down terms to understand the world around them.
I keep wondering why these people are the one in charge.