On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 9:05 AM Mark Tinka <mark.ti...@seacom.mu> wrote:
> > > On 19/Jun/20 14:50, Tim Durack wrote: > > > If y'all can deal with the BU, the Cat9k family is looking > > half-decent: MPLS PE/P, BGP L3VPN, BGP EVPN (VXLAN dataplane not MPLS) > > etc. > > UADP programmable pipeline ASIC, FIB ~200k, E-LLW, mandatory DNA > > license now covers software support... > > > > Of course you do have to deal with a BU that lives in a parallel > > universe (SDA, LISP, NEAT etc) - but the hardware is the right > > price-perf, and IOS-XE is tolerable. > > > > No large FIB today, but Cisco appears to be headed towards "Silicon > > One" for all of their platforms: RTC ASIC strapped over some HBM. The > > strategy is interesting: sell it as a chip, sell it whitebox, sell it > > fully packaged. > > > > YMMV > > I'd like to hear what Gert thinks, though. I'm sure he has a special > place for the word "Catalyst" :-). > > Oddly, if Silicon One is Cisco's future, that means IOS XE may be headed > for the guillotine, in which case investing any further into an IOS XE > platform could be dicey at best, egg-face at worst. > > I could be wrong... > > Mark. > > It could be worse: Nexus ;-( There is another version of the future: 1. SP "Silicon One" IOS-XR 2. Enterprise "Silicon One" IOS-XE Same hardware, different software, features, licensing model etc. Silicon One looks like an interesting strategy: single ASIC for fixed, modular, fabric. Replace multiple internal and external ASIC family, compete with merchant, whitebox, MSDC etc. The Cisco 8000/8200 is not branded as NCS, which is BCM. I asked the NCS5/55k guys why they didn't use UADP. No good answer, although I suspect some big customer(s) were demanding BCM for their own programming needs. Maybe there were some memory bandwidth issues with UADP, which is what Q100 HBM is the answer for. -- Tim:>
