Intel has revealed a next-generation communications platform to handle data processing across the network more efficiently and securely.

Codenamed ‘Crystal Forest,’ the technology is targeted toward the high-end networking market, competing against the likes of Freescale, Broadcom/NetLogic and Cavium.

Crystal Forest is expected to deliver up to 160 million packets per second performance for Layer 3 packet forwarding, making it possible to send thousands of high-definition videos across each network node.

Using ‘Intel QuickAssist technology’, secure Internet transactions can be accelerated up to 100Gbps on the platform to give service providers the ability to handle many more secure transactions and without the cost of specialised solutions.

The network will also be able to evolve to provide "always-on" secure Internet connections, as opposed to the opt-in connections currently used on select applications or for financial transactions online.

Currently, equipment manufacturers must combine a variety of highly specialised silicon co-processors with different software programming models to handle multiple communications workloads when building platforms for a scalable network - a very complex and expensive endeavor.

"With Crystal Forest, equipment manufacturers will be able to consolidate three communications workloads - application, control and packet processing - on multi-core Intel architecture processors to deliver better performance and accelerate time to market," says Intel. They can also develop a scalable product line based on multiple Intel processor options to plan for future performance increases.

"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," says Intel Communications Infrastructure Division general manager Rose Schooler, "service providers will be challenged to efficiently provision sufficient upstream capacity and manage the spike in network traffic."

Technology company Emerson Network Power plans to demonstrate the next-gen platform at the World Mobile Congress 2012, held in Barcelona at the end of the month.