It's not often that a couple of services create a market segment on their own, but that's what Google Fiber and Comcast's 2Gbps home broadband rivalry seem to have done.

To cope with such high speeds, Broadcom has baked up silicon that once would have been at home in an enterprise-grade router: a 1.8GHz, 64-bit quad-core ARM-compatible processor wrapped up with enough muscle for a 2.5Gbps Ethernet PHY interface.

Launched at this year's CES hypemare in Vegas, the BCM4908's Runner packet processor is specified for 5Gbps system throughput "without taxing the CPU," the company's announcement says.

On the user side, the BCM4908 can be paired with the company's BCM4366 Wi-Fi chip to deliver Wave 2 MU-MIMO speeds of more than 3.4Gbps.

There's also a security processor for VPN acceleration, BroadStream quality-of-service acceleration, and hardware acceleration for routing and USB storage.

Storage connectivity includes SATA III, two USB 3.0 ports, and three PCIe gen-2 ports.

Broadcom's spokesperson-in-a-can for the announcement, Manny Patel (director of marketing, wireless connectivity), name-checks UltraHD, the Internet of Things, and smart home applications as market drivers for the new chip, which is currently sampling. ®