New Cisco Cloud Scale ASIC & 400G Line Card Announced

by Juan Mulford June 17, 2020

written by Juan Mulford June 17, 2020

This week, Cisco has made two big announcements concerning the hybrid data center solutions, the next generation of Cisco’s Cloud Scale ASIC, and a new 400G line card for their Nexus 9500 modular chassis. With these two products, Cisco is making improvements in the capacity and manageability of their Nexus switching platforms and aims to help data centers scale with the increasing networking demands.

Cisco ASIC Nexus 400G

Cisco developed the Cisco Cloud Scale ASIC to power its next-generation switches for the next-generation data center. ASIC is designed from the ground up and is deployed across the Cisco Nexus 9200, Nexus 9300-EX, and Nexus 9500 modular switches. This new ASIC provides a bandwidth capacity of 25.6 terabits per second and supports the modern data center’s key capabilities, including granular telemetry with real-time visibility into packets, flows, and performance, according to Cisco. The ASIC was designed using a multi-die silicon technology, with one main die and multiple I/O chiplets; that now supports 512, 56 Gbps PAM4 SerDes. It is an ideal building block for 100G and 400G switch designs.

The company also announced the new 400G line card for the Cisco Nexus 9500 modular chassis. The Nexus 9000 Series data center switches offer high performance and density, and with the new card, up to 400G, low latency, and power efficiency in a range of form factors. Each new Nexus 9500 GX Line Card has 16 line-rate 400G ports. For the first time in a Nexus line card, each port also supports 400G line-rate MACsec and Cloudsec. Cisco indicates that with this line card, customers can deploy scalable mixed 100G/400G spine-leaf fabrics using a modular high-density 400G switch spine along with leaf switches with 100/400G uplinks.

Cisco will also release new 32- and 64-port, single-ASIC Cisco Nexus 400G switches early next year, to take full advantage of the latest Cloud Scale ASIC.