It's not every day you get to work on products that continue to evolve so quickly that before you finish talking about one device the next generation comes out. However, with Cisco Silicon One? that's exactly what we've done.
We recently announced our 19.2 Tbps P100 piece of routing silicon and I wanted to spend some time going over what it means from a system perspective.
There are several types of routing silicon available on the market today from third-party silicon providers to full system vendors. This silicon covers a variety of market needs but broadly speaking routing silicon breaks down into silicon that is built for core, peering, and aggregation markets versus those focusing on broadband aggregation. If we take a look at all the silicon currently available on the market, it's clear that Cisco Silicon One is in a class of its own, and still today there's no routing silicon that achieves higher bandwidth, even than our original Q100 announced back in 2019. Since then, we rolled out the Q200 with higher bandwidth and lower power consumption than the Q100. Today, less than 24 months from our initial Q100 launch and just 12 months from our Q200 announcement, we released the P100, further increasing our lead over the competition. We believe the Cisco Silicon One P100 is 2.6 times higher ethernet bandwidth than other routing silicon in the market.
The Cisco Silicon One P100 builds upon the great foundation that we created with Cisco Silicon One but continues to add features, buffering, scale, and programmability enhancements while growing the bandwidth.
Figure 1. Routing silicon available in 2021Because Cisco Silicon One devices can flexibly assign ports to be generic ethernet or a fully scheduled fabric, the Cisco Silicon One architecture enables optimized fixed boxes and modular systems.
Figure 2. Cisco Silicon One -Common architecture across form factorsThis capability is unique in the industry, and it allows us to offer products from a fixed box measuring just one rack-unit with a single piece of silicon, to a massive modular chassis with many pieces of silicon, to a fully disaggregated chassis with even more pieces of silicon. This is all accomplished with a common architecture, SDK, and P4 forwarding code.
This means that when we come out with a new piece of routing silicon, we enable our customers to enjoy benefits across their portfolio and network.
If I try to oversimplify the impacts of the Cisco Silicon One P100 in the market, we see that: