Marvell refreshed its enterprise switch silicon portfolio today with new Prestera switch and Alaska physical layer (PHY) chips. These chips are designed to scale from 1 Gb/s to 400 Gb/s to suit enterprise bandwidth demands from small business to large enterprise deployments.

According to Marvell, these capabilities provide a clear upgrade path for enterprises as they adopt WiFi 6 and 5G technology.

However, Marvell's switch chips offer more than higher capacities and throughput. They introduce edge compute functionality allowing for things like traffic flows, telemetry data, and security functions to be executed in place.

"We're extending out beyond just applying and providing the silicon to really looking at the system needs," said Gavin Cato VP of switch marketing at Marvell. "What we're seeing more and more is a desire to let layer two, layer three go and really focus on the orchestration management which provides the value add."

These capabilities become even more important as machines become the largest consumer of bandwidth, explained George Hervey, principal architect at Marvell.

"Machines have different characteristics, they generate more data, a higher resolution of data, they never go to sleep," he said. "There are a lot of aspects that drive the performance and data creation that networks are going to have to consume."

This effort to extend visibility across the network is nothing new for Marvell.

"We've really gone through three phases of this. The first phase was really about tracking resources at the chip level, the second phase was how do we get that to an orchestration layer and be able to debug the network at a top level and see the whole end to end," Hervey said.

With this latest iteration of enterprise switch chips, Marvel is focused on pushing those capabilities out to the very edge of the network.

"We really differentiate by placing the advanced packet processing technology all the way at the edge of the network, which is going to enable us to, as we proliferate and scale out, address these challenges," said Hervey.

Accompanying these capabilities are advanced security features as well as integrated general processing cores designed to enable new kinds of workloads within the switch.

"By pushing the intelligence into the access switch, we provide a platform for intelligent processing, whether that be AI offload and starting to do some inference on the data that's flowing through the network," Hervey said.

To complement these capabilities, Marvell offers both a turnkey software stack and a software development kit that aims to make it easier to take advantage of these features.

Marvell also supports the Linux Foundation's DENT and Open Compute Project's SONiC network operating systems.

"The idea is to get rid of the noise and manage the data that's going to be coming out of these devices, which is going to consume a lot of the backhaul," said Cato.

Finally, these chips also benefit from Marvell's newly unveiled custom ASIC offerings which enable customers to integrate customer intellectual property into any of Marvell's chip designs.

The vendor expects these products to launch by end of year.