Trident-4 BCM56880

Introduced June 11, 2019

As I write, this is very fresh. As is typical of Broadcom, we will not find out how much on-chip buffer it contains until switch products are announced. Typically, one year. Broadcom did offer a nice product announcement. The switch family can support 128 100-Gb/s ports or 32 400-Gb/s ports.

Accompanying the product blurb there is a 5 minute zippy video. Extracting a single image from the video, it seems clear that there will be down-scale versions of the Trident4 intended for the top-of-rack switch market. Individual models have not been announced. Within the ASIC, the pipeline is comprised of identical match-action elements. This regularity of architecture is compiler-friendly. Broadcom, perhaps seeing a competitive threat from barefoot networks and P4, is a sponsor of an open source programming language NPL or Network Programming Language.

Lifted from one of the trade rag stories -- the Trident4 is built with 7 nm silicon.

The first product I can find is Juniper's QFX5130. The data sheet says 132 MB of packet buffer. September 2020. Trident4 comes in four flavors: X11, X9, X4 and X2. The QFX5130 is an X11. The X9 has 82 MB of packet buffer.