Intel (News - Alert) announced that its “Crystal Forest” communications platform is now available with significant features designed to accelerate network services, improve secure network performance and efficiently and effectively handle data processing across networks.

The company also stated that the new platform is designed specifically for workload consolidation and is capable of performing applications, control plane, and data plane concurrently, with very high throughput.

The new platform blends a standard Intel CPU and a communications chipset both built using the standard 32nm (nanometer) process and it is capable of offering 160 million packets per second of forwarding capacity. The platform employs Intel’s own QuickAssist technology, which processes and accelerates specialized packet workloads to reach throughput levels that were previously possible only with specialized processors.

Intel asserted that the demand for increased network performance will continue to grow as more smart devices connect to the Internet every day. And with the popularity of social networking and other high-bandwidth services, such as video and photo uploads/downloads, interactive video, crowdcasting and online gaming, service providers will be challenged to efficiently provision sufficient upstream capacity and manage the spike in network traffic.

Equipment manufacturers are struggling to build solutions to manage the ever-increasing video traffic without compromising on security and performance and also with minimal complexities and operating costs. With the new Crystal Forest platform, manufacturers and service providers can seamlessly overcome these challenges and will be able to design a full range of communications solutions from small- to medium-sized business firewalls to high-end routers.  

Intel added that Crystal Forest is a communications optimized platform designed to handle a wide variety of network demands. Scheduled to be available later in 2012, the platform utilizes a common application programming interface and common drivers so that multiple designs can be implemented in much less time and at much lower development costs.