Cisco Nexus 9364C

beauty shot of a 2 RU switch

Introduced July 2017

This switch and its smaller cousin the 9332C are a one year later follow-on to the nexus 93180YC-EX. The switch ASIC is S6400.

The total buffer size is the same as the 93180YC-EX but it is carved into four slices to get the lookup performance required by the high count of 100 Gb/s ports. What is not so clear is how the slices are interconnected. Best guess is that there is some sort of crossbar switch. Each slice will need to dedicate some of its buffers for the slice interconnects. That means that 10 MByte per slice is probably not all available for burst absorption.

Marketing wise, Cisco seems to prefer Cloud scale ASIC over Leaf Spine Engine. The architecture of this switch is covered in BRKARC-3222. That paper says the switch is nonblocking, but that seems unlikely.

Speeds-and-feeds wise, the Nexus 9364 matches with the Nexus 3264. The latter is a Broadcom Tomahawk 2 product. Cisco is proud that their Cloud scale ASIC product made it to market before the merchant silicon Tomahawk 2.