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Earlier this month, Broadcom and Atheros announced new Gigabit Ethernet switch chips for consumer applications. These products target routers, residential gateways, and set-top boxes. Broadcom has migrated its five-port GbE switch from 130nm to 65nm. As a result, the company was able to shrink the die size, reduce the package, and cut power dissipation by 30% compared with its older device. We estimate the Broadcom BCM53115 has typical power dissipation of around 2W. Although Atheros released few details on its five-port GbE switch, it has a similar goal to reduce size and power dissipation. At 3W, the AR8316 dissipates more power than the BCM53115.

Both chips have a common set of features typical in this class of product. These include QoS, four classes of service, support for IPTV and voice, flow control, and lookup engines. Both products integrate five GbE PHYs, require an external host processor, and are currently sampling. For smart Ethernet switches, Vitesse provides an attractive alternative that has an integrated CPU. For power sensitive, unmanaged five-port designs, Broadcom's BCM53115 presents better value than competing products.

These announcements from Broadcom and Atheros also signal some longer term and more lasting trends. The future low-cost process geometry is likely to be 65nm—skipping the 90nm process nodes. Greater bandwidth in consumer environments is setting the stage for the Ethernet switch transition from Fast Ethernet to GbE. This transition will accelerate as vendors such as Broadcom drive down the cost of GbE switches. The end game is about winning the converged broadband consumer platform. Convergence requires multiple technologies, including low cost Ethernet switching, 802.11g/n controllers, VoIP, encryption, and packet engines. Opportunistic vendors are sure to be left behind as visionary vendors such Broadcom and Atheros gear up for this consumer battle. —Jag

Earlier this month, Mellanox disclosed its fourth generation of InfiniBand (IB) switch silicon. InfiniScale IV increases port density, supports QDR data rates, and adds congestion management and adaptive routing features. Whereas current InfiniScale III chips offer 24 DDR ports, InfiniScale IV integrates 36 QDR ports. Mellanox expects to sample the new switch chips early in 2008.

Built in a 90nm process, InfiniScale IV packs more than one terabit of maximum bandwidth into a single chip. Each of the chip's 36 ports has four lanes (4X). Each 4X QDR port provides 32Gbps of bandwidth after 8b/10b encoding overhead. Mellanox claims a port-to-port latency of only 60ns. Although server connections typically use 4X ports, up to three switch ports can be combined for switch-to-switch links of up to 96Gbps (12X).

For congestion management, the new switch adds support for congestion control as defined by the IB v1.2 specification. The new chip's adaptive routing features go beyond current IB standards. Responding to feedback from customers with very large clusters, Mellanox is supporting multiple paths between end points using static or dynamic routing. Full device details are not yet available - thermal management may be a challenge given InfiniScale III already dissipated a healthy 34W in DDR mode.

As the only vendor of merchant IB switch chips, Mellanox faces no direct competitors to InfiniScale. Indirect competitors include Fulcrum's 24-port low-latency 10GbE switch chips and Myricom's 32-port Myri-10G switch chip. In QDR mode, InfiniScale IV delivers nearly five times the bandwidth of Fulcrum's chip, which is limited to 10Gbps per port. Myricom's chip implements the Myrinet protocol at 10Gbps per port, yielding less than one-third the total bandwidth of InfiniScale IV. Until 40Gbps Ethernet is standardized, Mellanox is likely to maintain a significant performance and density lead over vendors with Infiniband alternatives. —Bob

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