Introduced Sept 14 2015
Arista becomes third to announce products based on Broadcom's Tomahawk switch chip. The 7060 and 7260 Tomahawk products have 25 Gb/s SERDES that can run at 25 or 10 Gb/s and therefore supporting port speeds of 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100 Gb/s. Not sure what the QX is. The 7260 appears to be made from four Tomahawks with half the ports used to support chip-to-chip interconnect. Note that 1 Gb/s is not a legal speed for the SFP+ ports. There are two SFP+ ports that can run downspeed.
|
7060CX-32 | 7260QX-64 | 7260CX-64 | |
---|---|---|---|
Switch Height | 1RU | 2RU | 2RU |
Ports | 32 x QSFP100 2 x SFP+ |
64 x QSFP+ 2 x SFP+ |
64 x QSFP100 2 x SFP+ |
Max. 10GbE Density | 130 | 2 | 258 |
Max. 25GbE Density | 128 | -- | 256 |
Max. 40GbE Density | 32 | 64 | 64 |
Max. 50GbE Density | 64 | -- | 128 |
Max. 100GbE Density | 32 | -- | 64 |
Max. I/O Rate (Tbps) | 6.4Tbps | 5.12Tbps | 12.8Tbps |
Max. Forwarding Rate | 3.3Bpps | 3.3Bpps | 9.52Bpps |
Latency | 450ns | 550ns | 550 to 1500ns |
Packet Buffer Memory | 16MB | 64MB | |
Airflow Direction | Front-to-Back or Back-to-Front |
As noted elsewhere, Tomahawk has four switch cores, each with a lookup engine and each with its own 4 MByte memory buffer pool.
Dynamic buffering happens within the domain of a single core. Buffers cannot be loaned to other cores. So for bursty best effort
traffic, the most buffer that can be claimed by a single core is 3 MByte --
depending on how much is reserved for dedicated port buffers.
Arista has published a QandA doc for the new switches. Since we are particularly interested in buffers: It is not clear that best of both worlds is anything new. Arista's Martin Hull described a similar system in a 2013 paper that accompanied introduction of Trident II products. What Tomahawk promises to bring is more buffer and, for highly bursty data transfers, the allocation of this memory to cores puts Arista's claims in the disingenuous category. Note that depending on the location of the input and output ports, a packet might touch a single switch core or it might touch two cores. It is possible that it might taste of two memory pools. If the internal connections between the cores are flow-controlled, perhaps the effective buffer size might be 4+4 = 8 MByte. No one has said this yet, and we'll be watching. In any case, this is still less buffer than the single core trident+ and trident2. |