Broadcom announced shipment of its new Trident 4-X7 Ethernet switch ASIC— a 4.0 Terabits/second fully programmable switch designed for enterprise data center ToR (Top of Rack) boxes.
The Trident 4-X7 offers native support for 400G connectivity to the next-generation spine/fabric technologies, while cutting power per 100G port by more than half versus the current generation solution. The programmable switching chip also offers hardware features for analytics, diagnostics and telemetry for automating data center operations. The chip also supports Enterprise SONiC and SAI. The chip is implemented in 7nm process technology.
“Broadcom has made huge investments in addressing the needs of our cloud customers,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager, Core Switching Group, Broadcom. “We are also uniquely positioned to bring all of these cloud technologies into enterprise data centers. Enterprise customers can now take advantage of the same capabilities and innovations.”
Key features of the new BCM56690 series include:
- Cost- and power-optimized for next-generation data center and campus networks, supporting 50G ToRs (48x50G + 8x200G, or 48x50G + 4x400G) with a compiler-programmable architecture
- Enterprise-grade feature set with a high degree of feature concurrency
- Architecture scalability for bandwidth requirements throughout the enterprise network: SKUs available up to 4.0Tbps, all supported with the same NOS and hardware code base
- Industry-leading fully shared packet buffer and database sizes
- Extensive, programmable in-band telemetry including support for IFA 2.0 (In-band Flow Analyzer version 2)
- A wide variety of load-balancing and congestion management features including Dynamic Load Balancing, Dynamic Group Multipathing, Resilient Hashing, Latency-Based ECN marking, and Elephant Flow detection and re-prioritization
- Broadview Gen 4 integrated network instrumentation feature set and software suite, providing full visibility to network operators into packet flow behavior, traffic management state, and switch internal performance
- Four GHz-class processors on-chip enabling powerful out-of-band (streaming) telemetry and a variety of Broadcom-provided embedded applications
- Robust connectivity using up to 160 instances of the industry’s best performing, longest-reach 50G PAM-4 integrated SerDes core, enabling a wide variety of optical and direct attached copper (DAC) links
