Cavium

» see cavium.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Cavium was incorporated in California in November 2000 and reincorporated in Delaware in February 2007, which is the paperwork trail of a company getting ready to go public. Syed B. Ali and Raghib Hussain started it after a Silicon Valley entrepreneur introduced them, and both were still in post at the end. It never owned a factory. It designed processors, had somebody else build them, and sold them to the companies whose logos you actually see.

The first products were security processors, the Nitrox line, selling from late 2001 to do the arithmetic for IPsec and SSL faster than a general purpose CPU could. OCTEON followed in 2004: a multicore MIPS processor aimed at the inside of networking equipment, sold at launch in sizes from two cores to sixteen and reaching 48 by 2012. In 2014 the company bet on ARM in the data center with ThunderX, a 48 core server chip, years ahead of the market that eventually formed around that idea.

By 2017 it was turning over $984 million a year and still reporting a loss from operations. Revenue had risen 63.1 percent in twelve months, most of that the first full year of owning QLogic. QLogic was bought in August 2016 and brought a storage and Ethernet adapter line in with it. Marvell announced the merger agreement in November 2017 and closed it on 6 July 2018.

~ the case file ~

~ the part you never saw ~

Enterprise silicon is anonymous by design. An OCTEON did packet inspection in a firewall or a carrier router that was sold to a network operator with a different name on the front, and the buyer was choosing between brands of box rather than brands of chip. Nothing in that category rewards a consumer brand, so the company never built one, and a customer could depend on its silicon for a decade without ever being in a position to choose it.

~ five customers and a country ~

The last annual report lays out how narrow the base was. The top five customers were 54.7 percent of 2017 revenue, and three of them accounted for 36.2 percent on their own: the server makers Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell, plus Nokia Solutions and Networks. The same dependency shows up in the geographic table, where the United States sits at $277 million and Finland sits at $62 million. A country of that size appears on a list like that for one reason, and the filing names it a few pages earlier.

A fabless company of 1,895 people, 1,387 of them in engineering, living on a customer list that short, is one cancelled product cycle away from a bad year. Selling at the top of the revenue curve was a rational thing to do.

~ 6 july 2018 ~

The merger filing is a tidy document. Each share converted into $40.00 in cash plus 2.1757 Marvell shares, Nasdaq filed the delisting notice the same day, and the six directors resigned at the effective time so that the directors of a shell called Kauai Acquisition Corp. could take their seats. Cavium filed its Form 15 eleven days later and stopped reporting.

cavium.com redirects to marvell.com today. The OCTEON name survived the takeover and is still on current parts, so the silicon outlived the company that drew it. For a chip business that is a good ending, and it explains why nobody marked the day.

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