Could Cisco be prepping a big router announcement March 4?

Is Cisco's much-publicized March 4 announcement going to be of a high-end core router, a big sister to its current big router, the CRS-1 (pictured)? It could be if you look at Monday's announcement of a 40-core network processor that Cisco spent $100 million and five years developing. Bob Wheeler, an analyst with The Linley Group told Network World's Tim Greene what he thought next Tuesday's announcement could be: "It sounds like a core router processor, but without knowing more, I'm not 100% sure about that. I doubt it would be for a Catalyst [6500 switch]." Our own Cisco Subnet blogger, Michael Morris told Greene: "Being that big [the processor boasts 800 million transistors and can perform up to 160 simultaneous processes] it seems to be destined as a main CPU in a device or supervisor blade."

Cisco has been working to flesh out its Data Center 3.0 strategy, launched back in July. Earlier this year, it launched its high-end Nexus data center switch so a matching high-end router would be logicial?

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