Juniper Networks claims its next-generation Express routing silicon, announced this week, offers higher performance than either Cisco's P100 or Nokia's FP5 ASICs. The new chips launch alongside three MX-series routers, all of which are powered by Juniper's Trio 6 ASICs.

Juniper saw “healthy demand” across both its MX and PTX product families, and the next-gen silicon families for those platforms will “offer industry-leading throughput, power efficiency, and logical scale, all while maintaining investment protection,” Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim boasted on this week's earnings call.

“These product lines generally address distinct use cases, edge routing for Trio 6 and core routing for the Express 5,” wrote Dell'Oro Group analyst Shin Umeda in response to questions.

Juniper introduced its Express silicon with its PTX-series routers back in 2012. Juniper's latest generation Express 5 chips are each capable of up to 28.8 Tb/s of throughput, or the equivalent of 36, 800 Gb/s interfaces. This represents a 45% improvement in power efficiency over previous chipsets, Brendan Gibbs, VP of automated WAN solutions at Juniper Networks, wrote in a blog post. 

“In comparison, Cisco recently-announced P100 silicon at 19.2 Tb/s, which offers 33% less throughput than Juniper’s new Express 5 silicon,” he said.

Cisco declined to comment on this claim.

However, comparing routing ASICs is hardly an exact science, according to Umeda. “It is always difficult to compare ASICs at any given time because of vendors’ different ASIC and router development and release cycles. Also, the ASICs announcements do not always align with actual implementation in router products,” he explained. “For example, the Trio 6 ASIC is just now shipping in MX line cards, but the Express 5 ASIC will not be commercially available in products for some time.”

The primary competitors of Juniper’s Express 5 chips and its core routers are Cisco’s Silicon One-based 8000-series and Broadcom-based NCS 5550 and 5700 routers, Umeda said. “Arista’s R-series routers based on Broadcom's Jericho ASICs also compete with Juniper PTX routers for some use cases,”

And while Cisco’s Silicon One ASICs have been shipping in products since 2019, Umeda noted that the P100 only recently began sampling, and its implementations in Cisco's 8000-series routers have not been publicly announced yet.

Juniper also unveiled its sixth generation Trio routing silicon this week for its MX Series routers. The machine learning-enabled chipset is based on a 7-nanometer manufacturing process and boasts "a 70% improvement in power efficiency compared to previous-generation chipsets,” Gibbs touted.

Trio 6 competes with Cisco’s Lightspeed+ ASICs used in its ASR 9000-series routers and Nokia’s FP5 ASICs used in its 7750-series appliances, according to Umeda.

Juniper’s 1.6 Tb/s Trio 6 is available now, “unlike some vendors’ new chipsets, which look to show up in actual products sometime in the distant, hazy future,” Gibbs wrote. 

Cisco’s Lightspeed+ began shipping in 2020, while Nokia's FP5 ASICs are expected to ship later this year.

The Trio 6 is at the heart of three new MX routers: the MX10K LC9600 line card, MX10004 multi-service edge router, and the MX304 compact multi-service edge router. The line cards are available now, while Juniper's multi-service routers will launch later this year.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to clarify comments on Cisco’s 8000-series routers shipment.