Broadcom unveiled the latest version of its Tomahawk Ethernet switch silicon that the company claims is twice as powerful as any other switching silicon on the market.

The StrataXGS Tomahawk 5 switches are targeted at 400-gigabit and higher Ethernet ports and deliver 51.2 Tb/s of switching capacity.

Broadcom Product Line Manager Peter Del Vecchio told SDxCentral that Tomahawk 5 is currently being shipped, and he expects hyperscalers like Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft will be "deploying this chip in their data centers next year."

"I mean, everyone is looking at this chip or plan[ning] to deploy it," he said. "Some customers are a little bit different as far as when they adopt those new technologies, but it is something where we do expect this to be a large portion of the bandwidth in the hyperscalers starting to deploy as of next year."

The new silicon also has specific features geared toward accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning workloads, Del Vecchio added, because they communicate in unique patterns compared to general compute and storage.

Since Ethernet is an open technology that provides equivalent or better performance than proprietary options like InfiniBand, for example, "it really makes for a very good solution for the hyperscalers as they add more AI/ML to their networks," Del Vecchio explained, adding that the Tomahawk 5 switches boast 256 ports supported on one chip to provide flat, low latency for AI and ML workloads.

Broadcom's Head Start

Del Vecchio noted one major competitor has announced a similar caliber switching silicon, "but they are very far from shipping," he said, referring to Nvidia's Spectrum-4 launch earlier this year. Broadcom's policy is to announce only once chips are being sampled, which he figures gives them a head start of between six and twelve months in terms of getting to market.

"Aside from time to market, certainly we're going to have an advantage as far as power consumption. As far as power efficiency, I think this is going to wind up being much more power efficient," Del Vecchio noted.

Broadcom released the first family of Tomahawk switches in 2014, and has been able to double the bandwidth of its switches nearly every two years. The Tomahawk 5 release follows this trend; just one of the latest switches can replace 48 original Tomahawk switches and reduce network power consumption by more than 95%. And in future releases, "we don't see that that's going to end," Del Vecchio said.

He also remains optimistic in regards to supply chain disruption that has historically slowed down the semiconductor industry. "As far as supply chain, we don't see anything delaying the silicon," he said, adding that supply chain constraints are usually less prevalent for advanced nodes like those on the Tomahawk 5 compared to legacy nodes. "As far as the deployment of this, we don't see any issues as far as supply chain actually slowing us down," he said.