Hardware acceleration

This document describes the Security Processing Unit (SPU) hardware that Fortinet builds into FortiGate devices to accelerate traffic through FortiGate units. Three types of SPUs are described:

  • Content processors (CPs) that accelerate a wide range of security functions
  • Security processors (SPs) that accelerate specific security functions
  • Network processors (NPs and NPLites) that offload network traffic to specialized hardware that is optimized to provide high levels of network throughput.

This FortiOS Handbook chapter contains the following sections:

Hardware acceleration overview describes the capabilities of FortiGate content processors (CPs), security processors (SPs) and network processors (NPs). This chapter also describes how to determine the hardware acceleration components installed in your FortiGate unit and contains some configuration details and examples.

NP6 and NP6lite acceleration describes the FortiGate NP6 network processor.

FortiGate NP6 architectures contains details about the network processing architectures of FortiGate units that contain NP6 processors.

FortiGate NP6lite architectures contains details about the network processing architectures of FortiGate units that contain NP6Lite processors.

describes the FortiGate NP4 network processor.

contains details about the network processing architectures of FortiGate units that contain NP4 processors.

What's new in FortiOS 6.0.3

The following list contains new Hardware Acceleration features added in FortiOS 6.0.3. Click on a link to navigate to that section for further information.

What's new in FortiOS 6.0.2

The following list contains new Hardware Acceleration features added in FortiOS 6.0.2. Click on a link to navigate to that section for further information.

What's new in FortiOS 6.0

The following list contains new Hardware Acceleration features added in FortiOS 6.0. Click on a link to navigate to that section for further information.