Marvell's Marvellous Architecture

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL), a technology leader in the development of extreme broadband communications solutions, today announced a revolutionary networking architecture that can serve the spectrum from metropolitan terabit systems -- one trillion bits per second -- as well as drive high-density Gigabit Ethernet -- one billion bits per second -- to the desktop. Marvell's Prestera(TM) 10 Gigabit switching architecture, coined after "presto" indicating speed and "tera" for its multi-terabit routing scalability, enables manufacturers to develop systems that bring richer content at higher speeds and with greater security to the Internet. Fueling Marvell's Prestera architecture is the first networking engine that simultaneously performs Layers 2/3/4, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and many other higher-layer features at full-wire speeds of over 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps). Compared with other existing solutions that perform only Layer 2 Ethernet at 10 Gbps, or network processors that perform only some of these features at 2.5 Gbps, the Company's Prestera architecture combines raw speed with an unprecedented level of feature richness. "Network state machines that efficiently execute basic functions such as Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching and that also perform advanced functions such as Network Address Translation (NAT) and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) provide serious competition to network processors," stated Joseph Byrne, analyst with Gartner Dataquest.Marvell Technology Group Ltd.