Broadcom commercially released its new StrataXGS Tomahawk 4 switch series silicon. The chipmaker says the new Ethernet switches can transmit up to 25.6 Tb/s, a feat that it claims to be at least double the bandwidth of any other switch silicon available today.

The new switch silicon doubles the bandwidth of Broadcom’s Tomahawk 3, which was “the world’s first 12.8 Tb/s chip,” said Peter Del Vecchio, product manager for Broadcom’s Tomahawk and Trident switch silicon. “Keeping with the Broadcom cadence, approximately every two years we’ve been doubling the bandwidth of the Tomahawk product line.”

Broadcom’s Tomahawk chip series is focused mainly on providing the highest bandwidth per watt and the highest bandwidth per process node, Del Vecchio explained. As such, the Tomahawk is targeted to hyperscalers and some large enterprises or smaller data centers that need to push the limits of bandwidth, he said.

“With Tomahawk 4 we can significantly improve network latency and have a savings of up to 75% in cost and power compared to previous solutions,” Del Vecchio said.

The Tomahawk 4 series is designed around 7 nanometer (nm) technology using 512 instances of the 50G PAM4 SerDes core. Bob Wheeler, principal analyst at The Linley Group, described the Tomahawk 4 as an “engineering tour de force, packing an unprecedented number of SerDes into a monolithic 7 nm chip,” in a prepared statement.

It also features 64 ports of 400-Gb/s Ethernet switching and routing for low-latency hyperscale applications and 256 ports of 100-Gb/s Ethernet. “[With] previous generations and most of the chipsets you’ll see they can’t handle that many logical ports or front-panel ports,” Del Vecchio said, adding that Broadcom set out early to deliver this capability.

As with previous leaps on this front, silicon comes first followed by hyperscale adoption a year or two later, he explained.

“We have seen some adoption just starting to ramp up with 400-Gb/s optics, but we see really like 2020 and forward as really where we’ll see a dramatic ramp in those volumes,” he said. “That kind of goes hand-in-hand with the silicon availability in that a lot of times the optics vendors will plan their products and their product ramps around the availability of the switch silicon.”

Volume shipments of 400-Gb/s optics were “fairly low” until earlier this year, Del Vecchio added.

Broadcom also introduced the Broadcom Open Network Switch APIs on GitHub, which effectively opens up its SDK APIs for the Ethernet switch silicon. With the initial release OpenNSA, Broadcom seeks to enable multiple open source networking operating systems initiatives to also drive those efforts on merchant silicon. “All the APIs in the Broadcom SDKs will now be provided open source,” Del Vecchio said.

More than a dozen companies are already using or plan to use the Tomahawk 4 switch series silicon in their respective data centers including Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Tencent, Uber, Arista Networks, Dell EMC, Juniper Networks, and others.