This IDC study provides the worldwide market forecast for communications processors for the 2014–2018 period. The study includes market share and analysis of major semiconductor companies, targeting equipment deployed in enterprise networks, mobile service provider infrastructure, and datacenters of cloud and Web service providers. The study reviews current industry dynamics, analyzes the market impact on vendors of communications processors collectively, and profiles the major vendors of SoC ASSPs and general-purpose standalone microprocessors that serve this market, specifically Avago-LSI, Broadcom, Cavium, Freescale, and Intel."The need to efficiently, intelligently, and securely manage the massive growth in the amount of data and information in the communications infrastructure is driving the need for multicore, programmable communications processor devices. These SoCs and standalone microprocessors experienced robust 8.8% growth in 2013 over 2012, driven by adoption in cloud datacenters and service provider networks, and IDC forecasts continued expansion of the market at a CAGR of 5.8% over the next five years as adoption of new architectures and deployment models drive upgrades in the infrastructure to support separation of hardware from software, network virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)," said Abhi Dugar, IDC research manager for Cloud and Mobile Infrastructure Semiconductors.