• Making Mainstream Ethernet Switches More Malleable

    August 4, 2017

    While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap.

    That is why Broadcom, which still has the lion’s share of switch ASIC sales in the datacenter, has revved its long-running Trident family of chips, which lead …

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  • Buffers Sometimes Beat Bandwidth For Networks

    December 8, 2016

    Just like every kind of compute job cannot be handled by a single type of microprocessor, the diversity of networking tasks in the datacenters of the world require a variety of different switch and router ASICs to best manage those tasks.

    As the volume leader in the switching arena, Broadcom comes under intense competitive pressure and has to keep on its toes to provide enough variety in its switch chips to keep its rivals at bay. One way that Broadcom does this is by having two distinct switch ASIC lines.

    The StrataXGS line of chips have the famous and ubiquitous …

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  • Broadcom Strikes 100G Ethernet Harder With Tomahawk-II

    October 31, 2016

    Because space costs so much money and having multiple machines adds complexity and even more costs on top of that, there is always pressure to increase the density of the devices that provide compute, storage, and networking capacity in the datacenter. Moore’s Law, in essence, doesn’t just drive chips, but also the devices that are comprised of chips.

    Often, it is the second or third iteration of a technology that takes off because the economics and density of the initial products can’t match the space and power constraints of a system rack. Such was the case with the initial 100 …

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  • Homegrown 25G Chips Help Cisco Hold The Switch Line

    March 1, 2016

    How much of a premium do you think that networking behemoth Cisco Systems plans to charge for its 25G Ethernet switches compared to their 10G predecessors? How does zero grab you? Or even less than zero?

    That’s the plan, and this is surprising but competition will do that. Considering the profit margins that Cisco shoots for and has historically attained, you might be thinking that the company would be willing to walk away from deals, or at the very least switch to merchant silicon and get into a price war with its growing ranks of rivals in datacenter switching to …

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  • Facebook Busts Out Of Homegrown Switches

    December 2, 2015

    There is a misconception out there that the hyperscalers of the world are so rich that they always have the shiniest new toys in their datacenters. This is not correct. Hyperscalers are restrained by the same laws of physics and the same rules of accounting and budgeting as the rest of the IT sector.

    That said, they do push up against boundaries earlier, and how they react to those boundaries is inherently interesting because these large organizations are a kind of leading indicator for directions in which large enterprises might eventually head when they hit a wall or a ceiling …

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  • Dell Goes Modular With Tomahawk 25G Switches

    September 24, 2015

    The “Tomahawk” switch chips from Broadcom, which are based on the new 25G Ethernet standard crafted by hyperscalers, are starting to appear in more and more devices. This week, it is Dell’s turn to roll out some iron.

    Back in April, Dell was the first vendor out the door with switches based on the Tomahawk chips, which support port speeds of 25 Gb/sec, 50 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec (with one, two, or four lanes per port) and which also can be downshifted to run at 10 Gb/sec or 40 Gb/sec speeds to be compatible with Ethernet server adapter cards and …

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  • Arista Wields Tomahawks In 25G Ethernet Price War

    September 14, 2015

    It looks like networking price war is getting set to break out in the largest datacenters of the world, and this is precisely what Google and Microsoft had in mind when they formed the 25G Ethernet consortium back in July 2014.

    Unhappy with the bandwidth, cost per bit, and high power consumption and heat dissipation of existing 40 Gb/sec and 100 Gb/sec switches, the two companies teamed up with switch chip makers Broadcom and Mellanox Technologies and switch maker Arista Networks to create a new standard that would offer 25 Gb/sec and 50 Gb/sec switching inside racks and feeding up …

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  • Broadcom Goes End To End With 25G Ethernet

    July 27, 2015

    The 25 Gb/sec Ethernet effort that was launched by Google and Microsoft a little more than a year ago, along with switch and adapter chip makers Broadcom and Mellanox Technologies and switch maker Arista Networks, continues to gather steam. Broadcom is ramping up production of its “Tomahawk” switch ASICs, and Mellanox has recently announced its Spectrum ASICs as well as adapter cards to support 25 Gb/sec, 50 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec speeds on servers. Now, Broadcom is rounding out its 25G offering as it debuts its next-generation of NetXtreme C-Series of server adapter cards, which will offer a significant …

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  • Avago-Broadcom To Take On Intel In The Datacenter

    May 28, 2015

    Might doesn’t make right in this world, but it sure helps. If the modern datacenter has taught us anything, it is that scale matters and as it turns out it matters for the manufacturers of the devices that go into various systems in the datacenter as much as it does for those who deploy and use those systems. It is with this in mind that we ponder the implications of the $37 billion acquisition of networking and wannabe server processor maker Broadcom by the recently very acquisitive Avago Technology, a maker of chips for optical networking, server networking, and storage …

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  • New Dune Chips Enable Heftier Switches

    March 19, 2015

    One size does not fit all when it comes to merchant silicon chips that are used to build network devices for enterprise, hyperscale, and service provider customers.

    Broadcom is more or less the merchant ASIC supplier of choice for the nascent open switch movement for datacenter switches, although Intel and Mellanox Technologies are active in this area as well. But the existing Trident+ and Trident-II ASICs and the future Tomahawk ASICs from Broadcom do not cover all of the use cases in high-scale, high-bandwidth networking. And so Broadcom is launching a line of switch ASICs that sacrifice a bit on …

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