Mellanox this week unveiled its first family of Ethernet switches powered by the company's Spectrum-3 ASIC.

The company's SN4000 switches are available in a number of form factors supporting 32-ports of 400 GbE, 64-ports of 200 GbE, or 128-ports of 100, 50, 25, and 10 GbE. At the heart of the new switches is Mellanox's latest switch ASIC, which is capable of 12.8 Tb/s of throughput and is designed for use in cloud data centers, Ethernet storage fabrics, and artificial intelligence (AI) interconnect.

According to David Iles, senior director of marketing for Mellanox's switch business, the two things that make Spectrum-3 special are its advanced telemetry capabilities and the ability to handle full-scale internet routing. He also touted the ASIC's storage and machine learning capabilities, which use a combination of RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and VX-LAN.

"What we're finding is a lot of people want to do machine learning, which means things like RoCE, but they also want to do things like multi-tenancy, which needs things like VX-LAN, and so we offer both on the same switch on the same ports working at the same time," he said.

Mellanox claims Spectrum-3-based switches are ideally suited for the build-out of large, high-performance Layer-2 and Layer-3 fabrics, in both virtualized and non-virtualized use cases.

Iles claims that the Spectrum-3 platform directly competes with Broadcom's Tomahawk, Trident 3, and Jericho switch chips. He explained that where Broadcom breaks up its switch chips into high performance with Tomahawk, large scale with Jericho, and a compromise between the two with Trident 3, Spectrum-3 offers both high performance and high scalability.

Mellanox's SN4000 series switches started shipping to customers this week.

Intel this week announced it had successfully integrated its 1.6 Tb/s silicon photonics engine with its 12.8 Tb/s Barefoot programmable Ethernet switches.

Hong Hou, VP and GM of Intel's silicon photonics products division, said in a statement that the demonstration is the first step to making optical I/O and silicon photonics a reality.

"Co-packaged optics offers power and density advantages for switches at 25 Tb/s and higher and ultimately is a necessary and enabling technology for bandwidth scalability in future networks," he said.

The co-packaged optical switch pairs the Barefoot Tofino 2 programable Ethernet switch, which Intel acquired with the purchase of Barefoot Networks in 2019, with the chipmaker's 1.6 Tb/s capable silicon photonics interconnect platform, which features four 400-Gb/s DR4 interfaces. Intel is aiming the technology at hyperscale data centers where the demand for low-cost interconnect and bandwidth continues to see rapid growth.

Today's data center switches depend on pluggable optics connected to switch serializer/deserializer (SerDes) ports. Intel says that as data center bandwidth continues to increase, connecting the SerDes to pluggable optics electronically will become prohibitively complex and power hungry. The solution, according to Intel, is to eliminate the SerDes middle and package the optics and switching hardware together.

While Intel has successfully demonstrated the technology, it is more than just a prototype in the lab and is actively demonstrating the co-packaged silicon photonics Ethernet switch to customers.