Intel today announced the company’s next-generation communications platform, codenamed “Crystal Forest.” The platform is expected to handle data processing across the network, while addressing the needs for handling cloud connectivity and content processing.

Currently, equipment manufacturers combine a variety of highly specialized silicon co-processors with different software programming models to handle multiple communications workloads when building platforms for a scalable network—a very complex and expensive endeavor. With Crystal Forest, equipment manufacturers will be able to consolidate three communications workloads—application, control and packet processing—on multi-core Intel architecture processors. They can also develop a scalable product line, based on multiple Intel processor options to plan for future performance increases.

“As broadband penetration in India increases through wired and wireless technologies during the next few years, more smart devices would need to connect to the Internet every day, causing demand for increased network performance,” said S. Natarajan, country business manager – embedded markets, Intel South Asia. “And, Intel’s next-generation communication platform provides the flexibility, scalability, and efficiency to address the challenges of service providers.”

R.K. Hiremane, regional director - datacenter and connected systems product marketing, Intel Asia Pacific said, “We are working with many service providers worldwide to demonstrate and prove the Intel Architecture value to solve their challenges. The Crystal Forest platform will help telecom equipment manufacturers build scalable, flexible platforms so that service providers can be faster in deploying new services more securely and at lower costs.”

Crystal Forest is expected to deliver up to 160 million packets per second performance for Layer 3 packet forwarding, making it possible to send thousands of high-definition videos across each network node. Previously, only ASIC or specialized processors were capable of sending more than 100 million packets per second.