Thanks to the Arista Warrior we know that the 7048 switches use a Petra switch chip. Petra was introduced by Dune Networks which has since been acquired by Broadcom. The 7048 has two Petra switches. One controls 32 Gig-E ports and the other one controls 16 Gig-E ports and the four 10 Gb/s uplink ports.

Arista offers a white paper that makes about the same case for deep buffers as does Force10. Arista claims in their comparison chart that 7048 has dynamic buffering. That means it is a shared memory design rather than virtual output queuing. Arista says the 7048 is a store-and-forward design that therefore does not have the obscenely low latencies typical of Trident products.