Nokia today unveiled its fifth-generation routing silicon, which it claims is the first programmable routing chip with support for 800 Gb/s pluggable optics.

“This is the industry's most advanced network-processing silicon for service provider IP networks,” Heidi Adams, VP of IP and optical network marketing at Nokia, said in a phone interview.

Dubbed the FP5, the new chip boasts 75% lower power consumption compared to previous generations and support for advanced line-rate encryption, making it ideal for emerging use cases like 5G backhaul and industrial IoT networks, the company claims.

Each chip is capable of 4.8 Tb/s of throughput and is among the first in the service provider space to utilize 100 Gb/s serializer/deserializers. This, Adams explained, allows the FP5 to support 800 Gb/s pluggable optics. However, until those optics are available sometime next year, she notes the FP5 is also backward compatible with 100 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s pluggables, including 400ZR coherent optics.

The FP5 also features Nokia’s ANYec encryption functionality, which enables the chip to process encrypted traffic at up to 1.6 Tb/s line rates across multiple traffic flows without compromising on latency, according to the vendor.

When it launches early next year, the FP5 will be available in a variety of standard, line card form factors and six new rackmount appliances. And because the silicon is programmable, the devices will support throughputs ranging from 2.5 Tb/s on the low end to 14.4 Tb/s on high-end, multi-processor line cards.

The FP5-equipped line cards are also backward compatible with previous-generation chassis, Adams said.

“You don't have to switch out power, cooling, throw in any fabric cards, you're good to go,” she said. “It’s fully backwards compatible. You can mix and match our earlier generation cards with the newer generation cards. It makes upgrades really easy.”

These capabilities make the chip ideal for service provider use cases, which are often much more demanding than data center environments, Adams said. “If you're building for data center or you're building for cloud, you're really all about speed and low power. But, if you’re a service provider, you need more, because you're delivering services."

One of the biggest differences between data center and service provider networks is the need for aggregation and oversubscription functionality.

“Every single house or single business you've connected isn't necessarily turned on at the same time all the time. So it's very common in service provider networks to oversubscribe,” she explained.

By taking advantage of this, Nokia is able to cram up to 36 800 Gb/s interfaces on a single line card or rack-mount appliance despite topping out at 14.4 Tb/s of raw capacity, half of what would be required otherwise.