Intel is testing a new comms chip which it wants to use to compete with Cavium, Freescale and NetLogic in packet processing.

Dubbed Cave Creek, the chip will sit alongside the latest Xeon processors so that they can handle up to 160 million packets per second of Layer 3 traffic. The Xeon and Cave Creek pairing, will become known as Crystal Forest and will be the first time that Chipzilla has shifted jobs in the data plane which is more focused on moving bulk packets quickly.

Intel's cunning plan is to drive more communications tasks onto x86 and in 2013 it wants to roll out a Xeon companion chip targeted at DSP jobs for wireless base stations. Intel said Cave Creek will be in production before the end of the year and will be used in a wide range of comms systems from “small- to medium-sized firewalls to high-end routers.”