Cisco's Silicon One webscaler-device family now has 10 members Cisco continues to crank up the speed of its webscaler-class Silicon One devices, this week adding three new devices—including 25.6Tbps switching silicon it says delivers 1.7 times higher bandwidth and three times higher packets-per-second than other silicon on the market. Cisco unveiled the Silicon One family of unified switches and routers in 2019 as part of what it called its “Internet for the Future” strategy. The Silicon One family is important as Cisco has designs on being a leading provider of the network underpinnings of large webscale and service provider networks. The family can also help Cisco compete effectively with others such as Intel, Broadcom, Juniper, Arista. The now 10-member Silicon One family features Cisco’s custom Silicon One chip technology and includes Cisco 8000 Series carrier-class routers built on that silicon all running the IOS XR7 operating system that runs the boxes and handles security. Silicon One optical-routing silicon includes support for large non-blocking distributed routers, deep buffering with rich QoS, and programmable forwarding. Since the devices are programmable, they can be customized for a range of applications from a single chipset—eliminating the need to deploy multiple, specific silicon chipsets for standalone processors, line-card processors, and fabric elements. This is accomplished with a common and unified P4 programmable-forwarding code and SDK, the company said. The new members of the Silicon One family include the programmable 25.6Tbps G100 device, the Q211, an 8Tbps routing ASIC, and the Q211, an 8Tbps switch ASIC. The G100 has individual 1.6Tbps interfaces, and because of the G100’s packet-processing engines, each can process a single flow at the full speed of the interface, wrote Rakesh Chopra, a Cisco Fellow in Cisco’s Common Hardware Group in a blog about the new devices. “By combining many programmable functions like parsing, processing, timestamping, counters, meters, histograms, watermarks, and flow analytics we’ve created a fully programmable temporal view of traffic patterns,” Chopra, stated. “Done in nano-second granularity, this programmable infrastructure allows customers to replay past events to truly understand the dynamics of their networks to troubleshoot the equipment, optimize the infrastructure, and identify malicious attacks.” Silicone On devices can also support white-box vendors or hyperscalers developing their own networking systems—one of the few times Cisco has acted as a merchant silicon vendor. How much impact that capability has been exploited by other vendors is unclear a this point, industry watchers say. Cisco said the Cisco Silicon One G100 is being tested by customers now. Cisco introduced six other Silicon One devices last October including the 6.4Tbps Q201L 64x100GE web scale switch and the 3.2Tbps Q202L 32x100GE web scale switch. Related content news analysis Western Digital keeps HDDs relevant with major capacity boost Western Digital and rival Seagate are finding new ways to pack data onto disk platters, keeping them relevant in the age of solid-state drives (SSD). By Andy Patrizio Dec 06, 2023 4 mins Enterprise Storage Data Center news analysis Global network outage report and internet health check Cisco subsidiary ThousandEyes, which tracks internet and cloud traffic, provides Network World with weekly updates on the performance of ISPs, cloud service providers, and UCaaS providers. By Ann Bednarz and Tim Greene Dec 06, 2023 286 mins Networking news analysis Cisco uncorks AI-based security assistant to streamline enterprise protection With Cisco AI Assistant for Security, enterprises can use natural language to discover policies and get rule recommendations, identify misconfigured policies, and simplify complex workflows. By Michael Cooney Dec 06, 2023 3 mins Firewalls Generative AI Network Security news Nvidia’s new chips for China to be compliant with US curbs: Jensen Huang Nvidia’s AI-focused H20 GPUs bypass US restrictions on China’s silicon access, including limits on-chip performance and density. By Anirban Ghoshal Dec 06, 2023 3 mins CPUs and Processors Technology Industry Podcasts Videos Resources Events NEWSLETTERS Newsletter Promo Module Test Description for newsletter promo module. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe