Cisco has announced a brand new ASIC platform called Silicon One. The company says it invested five years of development into this platform.
Why so long? Cisco’s goal was to start from a clean sheet and rethink its approach to ASIC design.
The result? The company says it can use the same platform to develop ASICs for routers and for switches, and that it can serve in any part of the network (core, aggregation, access, large-scale data center, etc).
By building from a common platform, Cisco says it will be able to accelerate innovation and enable developers to write to a uniform platform, all without having to make tradeoffs among peformance, power efficiency, scale, feature sets, and so on, that you get from building more specialized ASICs.
I’m not sure I buy this argument, but Cisco clearly wants to contrast this new architecture with competing approaches from companies such as Broadcom, which builds separate ASICs for different use cases (such as the just-announced Tomahawk 4, a 25.6Tbps speed demon that sacrifices features for speed).
Welcome To The (Routing) Family
Cisco also announced a new router series, the Cisco 8000, which runs on the Q100 ASIC, the first model in the Silicon One family.
The Q100 ASIC offers throughput of 10.8Tbps, supports deep buffers and an Internet-scale route table. It also supports the P4 programming language, though Cisco didn’t make much of this fact in a broadcast event announcing the chip. I’m hoping to dig up more on its programmability as I dig into data sheets and specs.
The Cisco 8000 series also supports SAI/SONiC for open networking. This means service provider and hyperscaler customers can run third-party network OSs on Cisco hardware.
This isn’t Cisco’s first foray into disaggregation, but it’s a clear sign that Cisco realizes it’s going to have to separate hardware and software if it wants to compete for business among hyperscale customers and large service providers.
Speaking of which, during the Cisco launch event, the company brought several tech partners to the stage including AT&T. The AT&T spokesperson noted that the telco has a program it’s running in which Cisco’s IOS XR7 software is being used on white box switches.
The 8000 series ranges from 1RU fixed-form chassis options with 400 and 100GbE ports up to a 33RU modular chassis that tops out at 259.2Tbps.
