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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
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 “Trident+” 10 Gb/sec and “Trident-II” 40 Gb/sec ASICs as well as the “Tomahawk” chips for 50 Gb/sec and 100 Gb/sec switching that made their debut in late 2014 and the “Tomahawk-II” follow-on that was just rolled out in October and that should appear in products sometime in the fall of next year. (Breathe now.) These Trident and Tomahawk chips are aimed at the cheap, fixed port, high bandwidth switches that dominate corporate and hyperscale datacenters. The Trident+ ASICs topped out at 640 Gb/sec of aggregate switching bandwidth, which the Trident-II doubled that up to 1.28 Tb/sec, the Tomahawk hit 3.2 Tb/sec and the Tomahawk-II doubled that up to 6.4 Tb/sec.The StrataDNX line came to Broadcom through its $178 million acquisition of Dune Networks back in 2009, a company that was nine years old back then and that had developed a family of ASICs that are used to create modular switches (rather than fixed port devices) that have blades that can allow an enclosure to run multiple speeds and port counts and to make high-scale fabrics that link line cards within the chassis. These Dune devices are slower and deeper, rather than being more fast and furious. The modularity and flexibility of the Dune chips allows switch makers to create scalable devices that not only sport more ports, but that also have deeper buffers and larger tables (offloaded to DDR4 or GDDR5 memory) and have quality of service features that can allow for capacity to be allocated on a per-subscriber basis across the switching capacity encapsulated within the chassis. The deeper buffers are key for networks with heavy congestion (which happens on clouds and hyperscale workloads) and larger tables are key for networks with lots of devices hanging off them.The “Arad” switch ASIC and “FE” fabric Ethernet chips in the Dune family debuted
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