Arista Networks became the latest vendor to join the growing 800G cohort, unveiling new 800 Gb/s routers to support intense AI workloads.

The California-based firm unveiled its family of R4 series platforms, marketed for use in high-capacity AI clusters. They are designed to form the basis of more efficient two-tier leaf network designs, compared to the traditional, yet complex, three-tier architecture.

Customers can choose between fixed and modular platforms. The modular 7800R4 system provides density up to 576 ports, with HyperPort, the vendor’s new high-speed, single-port interface to scale across interconnections between data center locations. The 7280R4 fixed platform is a more compact iteration of the 7800R4.

“The 800G market is growing explosively with port shipments more than tripling sequentially in [the second quarter],” Crehan Research President Seamus Crehan, noted in a statement tied to the Arista release. “These new 800G products from Arista are well-timed to capitalize on this segment’s projected 90% five-year average annual growth rate driven by AI, storage, and general compute workloads.”

In addition to the new R4s, Arista unveiled the 7020R4 Ethernet leaf switches, which are designed for high-speed direct server connectivity. The vendor touts the switches as “ideal” for heterogeneous environments and high-end workstations.

800G on the rise

A growing number of vendors have been offering 800G solutions in recent years, even before the AI boom, as a way to help reduce costs by eliminating the need for multiple slower line cards.

Earlier this week, Nvidia earlier this week unveiled its latest generation of BlueField data processing unit (DPUs), which offers 800 Gb/s of throughput.

Broadcom is making similar strides, unveiling an 800G network interface card in mid-October to complement its Tomahawk 6 chip powering large-scale AI clusters.

Alibaba Cloud and Applied Optoelectronics Inc. (AOI) are also among the vendors embracing 800G equipment, while Lumen isn’t far off.

With all the recent strides around 800G, several vendors are moving one step further to 1.6 Tb/s (1.6T) to meet even more intense demands.

“Virtually all of them are doing that at 400G. Most are moving to 800G, and most will move to 1.6T when that's available,” Bill Gartner, SVP and GM for optical systems at Cisco’s Optics Group, recently told SDxCentral, adding that around 350 service provider customers have adopted the same technology from Cisco.