The first thing that Broadcom has done is widened the Tomahawk 4 lineup, whose initial member was announced in December last year, a 25.6 Tb/sec device that can drive 64 ports running at 400 Gb/sec that is now shipping in volume, Peter Del Vecchio, product manager for the Tomahawk and Trident lines at Broadcom, tells The Next Platform. We will be diving into the Cisco Silicon One devices soon so we can get a better handle on them.Īs 2020 is starting to wind down – thank heavens – Broadcom is rounding out the “Tomahawk” family aimed largely at the hyperscalers and big public cloud builders and the “Trident” family of chips aimed at enterprise switching, taking on the six new Silicon One chips that Cisco revealed back in October as well as the ASICs coming out of the rivals mentioned above. Cisco could have chosen to make merchant silicon anytime since the late 2000s to blunt the attack coming from Broadcom, but didn’t until last year.
While there is plenty of competition in the merchant Ethernet switch chip market, including Nvidia (Mellanox), Innovium, Intel (Barefoot Networks), Marvell, and a handful of other upstarts are in there, and they are getting an increasingly large share of switching, particularly among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that set the networking pace.īut it is Broadcom, not Cisco, who is the switch chip designer that is the one to beat, regardless of all of the noise that Cisco has been making about its Silicon One router and now switch chips that are aimed at the top-end of the merchant chip space and mark that company’s entry into the merchant market. (Meaning not including the campus and the edge.)
Cisco Systems may still be the biggest supplier of switches and routers in general, but it has long since been surpassed by Broadcom when it comes to suppling the silicon that does the switching itself and sometimes even a little bit of routing in the datacenter in particular.
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