Broadcom announced its StrataXGS Tomahawk II Switching chip — the highest performance Ethernet switch to date, packing up to 64 ports 100GE or 128 ports of 50GE with SDN-optimized packet switch engines operating at 6.4 Terabits per second.
The StrataXGS Tomahawk II Tomahawk II integrates 256 serdes running at over 25 Gbps, with large on-chip forwarding tables and packet buffer memory. The chip supports Broadcom’s next generation BroadView instrumentation and control capabilities. Tomahawk II also provides enhanced traffic load balancing, network visibility and control of traffic provisioning.
StrataXGS Tomahawk II Key Features
- 6.4 Tbps Multilayer L2/L3/MPLS Ethernet switching
- Support for 64 ports 100GE, or 128 ports 40GE/50GE
- 256 x 25Gbps SERDES
- Low Latency StrataXGS Pipeline Architecture
- FleXGS flow processing with flexible match/action capabilities
- Dynamic Flow Distribution for large scale Layer3/ECMP networks
- Increased On-Chip Forwarding Databases
- Higher Capacity Embedded Packet Buffer Memory
- Enhanced BroadView network telemetry features
- Comprehensive overlay and tunneling support including VXLAN, NVGRE, MPLS, SPB
- Advanced OpenFlow support using Broadcom OF-DPA
- 16nm process
“Our StrataXGS Tomahawk II comes just two years after Tomahawk with twice the bandwidth and resource capacity. We expect this to accelerate 100G adoption in the next wave of data centers, while delivering network scale and visibility for public/private cloud computing, storage and HPC fabrics,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager, Switch Products at Broadcom. “Tomahawk II will leverage the 25G/100G infrastructure established with the highly successful Tomahawk line.”
