Jarrod Siket is senior vice president of marketing and sales for Cranberry-based Netronome. The company has developed a new computer network processor that boasts increased performance speeds and is the replacement compatible product with Intel's network processor.

CRANBERRY TWP — The Netronome company has developed a new computer network processor that is touted to increase performance speeds and is the replacement compatible product with Intel's network processor.

The company's new NFP-32xx Network Flow Processor was unveiled this week to provide a secure flow of computer processing for computer servers and network equipment.

"Netronome is pleased to announce the Network Flow Processor as a testament to the shared vision we have with our customers that every packet will be intelligently and securely processed," said Niel Viljoen, founder and chief executive officer of Netronome.

Netronome is a high-tech venture company that came out of the former Fore Systems founded by former FORE Systems Viljoen and initially funded by FORE systems founders Robert Sansom and Eric Cooper.

The high-tech semiconductor company specializes in network acceleration cards to provide better security to computer networks.

It employs more than 100 employees. About one third of those work in the Emeryville Drive office in Cranberry.

The company also has offices in San Jose, Calif., Boxborough, Mass., and in England, China and South Africa.

Jarrod Siket, senior vice president of marking and sales for Netronome, said this is a specialized processor for bigger offices and larger companies.

Working under an agreement with the Intel Corp., Netronome took Intel's network processing chip and developed its next generation that would be compatible with the previous Intel network flow processor chip.

"The Network Flow Processor provides existing Intel IXP28XX customers with a path forward for the evolution of their high-performance product designs," said Rose Schooler, general manager, Performance Products Division of Intel.

It is the Cranberry company's first silicon-based computer chip and is projected to cost business consumers around $275.

The processor was three years in development, and company officials project it will have a seven to 10-year life cycle.

Siket said similar to the processors that Intel provides for home personal computers or laptops, Network Flow Processors are used as the brains for the networking and communications equipment that makes up the Internet and other enterprise and business networks.

"To provide you a brief comparison of the difference in scale, the most expensive chips available for use inside your laptop might have one or two 'cores' that provide all of the processing for your work," said Siket. "The devices Netronome are launching, based on an agreement with Intel, are 40 cores, running at 1.4GHz per second."

The additional cores allow these chips to execute 56 billion instructions every second. In a networking application, this results in more than 1,800 actions that can execute on every single message on the network, every second at 10 Gigabits of speed.

"People are now able to build incredibly fast networks that enable a new generation of applications for communications, television, video conferencing, gaming, social networking, business applications and new forms of entertainment," said Siket.

"And at the same time, they are able to watch and monitor all of the traffic, much like the security line at the airport, but with no lines, to ensure that all of the communications on the network are safe, secure, legal, and other forms of security."