There has been a heated debate as a result of this Network World story which 
asks the question of exactly how is it that Cisco claims the ASR 9000 can achieve 6.4Tbps of bandwidth with 400Gbps per slot. The folks at Seeking Alpha say they've figured it out and if they are right, that speed likely won't be available in the ASR 9000 until 2010. They write:
"We think we know what the answer might be and it is EZchip Semiconductor. EZchip develops network processors for carrier Ethernet equipment and counts among its earliest customers 'two of the three largest CESR vendors.' ... we have come to learn through our independent research efforts that EZchip’s NP-3c processor is being used in the initial line cards for the ASR 9000 and EZchip’s 100 gig NP-4 processors are likely to be included in future line cards for this product. So in one sense the skeptics are right: the pro forma capacity and functionality of the ASR 9000 will not be available in 1Q 2009 when the product begins shipping, but rather this functionality will be available when the NP-4 based line cards are available which we estimate will be in 2010."
The Seeking Alpha article speculates that Cisco is keeping mum on the technology and the supplier because it has put itself in a delicate position by relying on a third-party manufacturer for such a core piece of the ASR 9000. While Cisco uses third-party chip makers in numerous other ways and other products, in this case, Cisco may have opted not to go with a custom ASIC in order to use the more flexible, programmable processor that EZchip supplies. And that means that this chip could wind up being central to its competitors' next generation CESR gear as well. If that's the case, Cisco wouldn't exactly want to broadcast information about its supplier.
But EZchip is already a public company (trading under the symbol EZCH) and if it has snagged Cisco as a customer (and the ASR 9000) Wall Street, and the rest of the world will need to know. Hopefully Cisco will voluntarily clarify the ASR 9000's 6.4Tbps/ 400Gbps technology and timeline by the time it has made the product available for customers to purchase.
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Alcatel-Lucent responds to the ASR 9000 mystery
Yours truly received the following email message from Alcatel-Lucent regarding the ASR 9000 mystery:
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We want to stress that the currently shipping 50G linecards for the Alcatel-Lucent 7450 ESS and 7750 SR use Alcatel-Lucent’s award-winning homegrown 100G FP2 silicon, which comprises network processor and traffic manager chips – our FP2 silicon "sampled" in 2007 and we started shipping 50G linecards using FP2 in July 2008.
The FP2 chipset is also the foundation for Alcatel-Lucent's roadmap to get to 100G and beyond and it is in production today.
No other router vendor will have samples of a comparable 100G chipset before mid-2009 (i.e. Alcatel-Lucent has almost a 2 year lead over Cisco and Juniper on 100G NPU/TM chips for routers).
Note that chip performance is generally stated in half-duplex, so one 100G NPU will typically enable a 50G router linecard, but will have limited feature depth and scale (for the 7450 and 7750 IOM3-XP, we use two 100G NPUs in serial to provide 50G full-duplex throughput – using two NPU’s in serial provides the additional processing power necessary to massively and simultaneously scale multiple services, flows, subscribers, QoS etc.
The MX linecard needs 4 x EZ-chip and 4 x I-chip to deliver 40G today (since all the chips are nominally 20G performance).
Using a 100G NPU to create a 400G linecard would therefore need at least 8 x 100G NPUs (and possibly more), plus all the associated memory, traffic management etc.etc.
Getting beyond 100G linecards is definitely a big challenge in physical space, power and heat management.
Measuring a chip by its nominal throughput doesn't truly measure its capabilities.
Memory speeds affect packet manipulation, table lookups, ACLs etc. etc. and determine how much can be done to a packet while moving through the NPU.
Alcatel-Lucent’s 5 year old FP1 chipset provided 4 x memory access speed vs comparable merchant silicon and we expect our currently shipping 100G FP2 chipset to provide a similar advantage vs 100G merchant silicon when it samples in 2009.
One further point to note is that in the 12+ months since we sampled the 100G FP2 chipset, our design engineers haven’t been idle.
If we had to sum it all up – the slot capacity is only as good as the available switch fabric, NPU and linecards – those dictate actual performance and capabilities.
Alcatel-Lucent is the only router vendor with 100G NPU today and that’s why we’re the only router vendor with >40G linecards currently shipping.
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Sincerely,
Brad Reese
http://www.BradReese.Com
You should correct your
You should correct your article, the author of the report you cited is not Seeking Alpha, it is Domino Analytics. Seeking Alpha simply published the report authored by Domino Analytics.
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