News & Analysis
Comment
rick.merritt
Competitors Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei and Juniper all still put ...
iniewski
They might be forced to do whether they like it or not...if every box maker ...
Cisco chip exec sees steady ASIC investments
Rick Merritt
9/27/2012 9:28 AM EDT
Physical layout
“We had never fully optimized for latency before, so we looked at everything from packet processing to queuing and output on a single chip with shared memory doing cut-through switching,” said Lenoski. “We have a number of experts in networking, silicon and the customer applications, and it’s the combination of that knowledge that lets us do these things,” he said.
The near-GHz chip is one of several 40-nm designs now in shipping Cisco products. “We have a number of 28-nm designs in the pipeline, but we are not in a lot of production at 28 nm yet,” Lenoski said.
The company’s ASICs serve a range of systems including high-end, processor-intensive routers and boxes that push the limits of virtual switching or pack an outsized number of 40- and 100-Gbit/s interfaces.
Since it started work on 65-nm chips, Cisco has been increasingly involved in physical layout of some of its designs, including Montecello. It’s switch and router group has a full customer-owned tooling capability to handle physical design.
Proponents of the OpenFlow initiative said the trend toward centralized software-defined networks will radically simplify the tomorrow's routers and switches. Lenoski doesn't buy that.
“There are real-time constraints and reachability issues because switches and routers are distributed, deployed all over the place, and they are not one-to-one connected to servers,” Lenoski said. “So I think a lot of functions will stay in switches and routers, but the ability to program and understand the network [centrally] will increase over time,” he added.
Related stories:
“We had never fully optimized for latency before, so we looked at everything from packet processing to queuing and output on a single chip with shared memory doing cut-through switching,” said Lenoski. “We have a number of experts in networking, silicon and the customer applications, and it’s the combination of that knowledge that lets us do these things,” he said.
The near-GHz chip is one of several 40-nm designs now in shipping Cisco products. “We have a number of 28-nm designs in the pipeline, but we are not in a lot of production at 28 nm yet,” Lenoski said.
The company’s ASICs serve a range of systems including high-end, processor-intensive routers and boxes that push the limits of virtual switching or pack an outsized number of 40- and 100-Gbit/s interfaces.
Since it started work on 65-nm chips, Cisco has been increasingly involved in physical layout of some of its designs, including Montecello. It’s switch and router group has a full customer-owned tooling capability to handle physical design.
Proponents of the OpenFlow initiative said the trend toward centralized software-defined networks will radically simplify the tomorrow's routers and switches. Lenoski doesn't buy that.
“There are real-time constraints and reachability issues because switches and routers are distributed, deployed all over the place, and they are not one-to-one connected to servers,” Lenoski said. “So I think a lot of functions will stay in switches and routers, but the ability to program and understand the network [centrally] will increase over time,” he added.
Related stories:
|
|
|
|
|
Navigate to related information
GroovyGeek
9/27/2012 12:47 PM EDT
If this sentiment is strongly embedded in Cisco culture then the company is bound to be the next DEC. And I don't mean that as a compliment
Sign in to Reply
iniewski
9/27/2012 1:03 PM EDT
Interesting point @GroovyGeek...arguments put forward by OpenFlow initiative sounds compeling
Sign in to Reply
Frank Eory
9/28/2012 7:13 PM EDT
It's great to hear that Cisco still sees a competitive advantage in designing its own ASICs.
Sign in to Reply
iniewski
9/28/2012 7:29 PM EDT
They might be forced to do whether they like it or not...if every box maker standardize on commonly available ICs nothing would prevent a new competitor from copy and paste operation in China...your own ASIC might be the only real solution to that threat, suing might be more challenging...Kris
Sign in to Reply
rick.merritt
9/30/2012 10:59 AM EDT
Competitors Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei and Juniper all still put significant investments into ASICs.
Others however like Arista and Extreme use off the shelf chips from Broadcom and others.
Sign in to Reply