Cavium's best chips used the MIPS design, the same architecture that once powered the Nintendo 64. The Mountain View company packed many of those cores onto one chip, called OCTEON, and sold it to the makers of routers, switches and security boxes. Its customers included Cisco, Aruba Networks, Citrix and F5. When Cavium went public in May 2007, it had more than 100 customers. Every one of those boxes needed a fast brain to sort and secure the traffic passing through it.

A Chip Full of Cores

Syed Ali and Raghib Hussain were among the founders of Cavium in November 2000. They saw that network equipment needed more than raw speed. It also had to encrypt, inspect and sort traffic as it passed. Cavium built processors with many cores and special engines for those jobs. The bet was that equipment makers would rather buy that power on a chip than design it themselves, and the OCTEON family began shipping in volume.

Bought by Marvell

Cavium priced its offering at $13.50 a share in May 2007 and listed on Nasdaq. Over the next decade it grew by acquisition, adding storage and server chips, including the purchase of QLogic in 2016. Cavium also built ARM-based server processors called ThunderX. In July 2018 Marvell Technology completed its purchase of Cavium in a deal worth about $6 billion.

Cover: Grotto and Friars, from The Ruins of Rome, Bartholomeus Breenbergh. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a deep grotto (Cavium, the cave).