Cisco injected 800-gigabit (800G) performance into its long-standing 8000 Series routers that are targeted at hyperscalers, service providers, and enterprises supporting bandwidth-intensive network applications like 5G, IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). The new platform also gets a market jump on competing offerings from rivals like Juniper Networks and Nokia.

The updated routers are boosted by Cisco’s new line card that is built on the vendor’s Silicon One P100 ASIC. The new card supports 28.8 terabits of capacity with 36 ports of 800G, and the 8000 Series router can house up to 18 of those line cards to provide up to 518 terabits of system capacity.

Guru Shenoy, VP of product management at Cisco, explained the silicon is the first to support 100G serializer/deserializer (SerDes) connectors, which allows customers to double current 400G port densities and are an eight-times increase for 100G port densities within the same form factor. “This means that for high-bandwidth applications we can send data more efficiently instead of using a 50-gig link,” he said.

Shenoy explained the overall form factor is up to six-times more space efficient compared to current 400G products. When combined in the 8000-series router, the package is up to 83% smaller and provides up to 68% power savings when migrating traffic from 400G to 800G.

These efficiency gains build on past eco-friendly comments from the vendor.

The new platform also gains software advantages. This includes access to Cisco’s IOS XR Path Tracing and Crosswork Network Automation to improve visibility and insights that make the platform easier to manage.

Shenoy noted the target market is experiencing an increasing need to support high-bandwidth applications. He cited the spine networks within hyperscaler data centers and interconnected backbone networks for those hyperscalers, telecom operators, and enterprises.

“It's really that class of customers, there’s a wide breadth of them, but everybody that’s interested in building high scale, high-bandwidth infrastructure,” Shenoy said.

The Cisco product is also joining an increasingly competitive market that is migrating toward 800G capabilities.

Cisco initiated its move with the P100 launch in October 2021. That came on the heels of Nokia updating its FP5 platform, and Juniper Networks following suit early last year with its next-generation Express routing silicon that it claimed offered higher performance than Cisco’s P100 and Nokia’s FP5.

From a performance perspective, Shenoy touted the power density advantage of Cisco’s new networking offering. He specifically called out its ability to support 19.2 Tb/s of speed on a single piece of silicon.

“If you look at anybody competitive, including our own previous generations, they are less than half of that in terms of pure chip capacity,” Shenoy said. “What that means is we are able to provide that density in a much more efficient manner.”

Dell’Oro Group analyst Shin Umeda at the time of Juniper Networks’ launch did note challenges in direct comparisons between competing network silicon platforms.

“It is always difficult to compare ASICs at any given time because of vendors’ different ASIC and router development and release cycles,” Umeda explained. “Also, the ASICs announcements do not always align with actual implementation in router products.”

Shenoy also pointed to availability, stating “we have availability, we are in trials, and are the first ones to do that. Others have announced chips.”

“The key to remember is when you announce a chip, there's a bunch of things that happen between then and when it actually shows up in a system that can go into a customer's lab or a production environment,” Shenoy said, adding this is usually an 18-month process.

Cisco’s launch included supporting commentary from Stc Infrastructure, Colt Technology Services, and Florida LambdaRail, and the vendor has an 8000 Series history with network operators like Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile US.

“We are about to turn on availability as well, make it available to everybody, so this is real, it's available, it’s in trials as we speak,” Shenoy said.