Cavium broadens its Xpliant switch-chip offerings
Wednesday, August 2, 2017 at 8:08AM - Two families of Xpliant switch chips have been unveiled: the XP60 with sub-terabit switching capacities and the mid-range XP70 devices with 1 to 1.8 terabits of capacity.
- The switch ICs broaden the datacom and telecom markets Cavium can now address.
- Cavium is developing a next-generation high-end switch chip but the company is not saying when it will be announced.
Cavium has broadened its portfolio of switch chips. The two families - the XP60 and the XP70 - have smaller switch capacities than Cavium’s XP80 Xpliant family and feature architectural enhancements.
“The new chips expand Cavium’s addressable markets to include enterprise and carrier-access networks as well as mainstream cloud data centres,” says Bob Wheeler, principal analyst for networking at The Linley Group.
John Harrsen
The switch chips enable Cavium to address 25-gigabit interface switches, power-constrained enclosure designs such as blade servers, and 5G cloud radio access networks (CRAN) and GPON aggregation.
Until now Cavium has offered three XP80 Xpliant switch ICs, the largest being a 3.2-terabits switch. In contrast, the three XP70 devices have switch capacities of 1, 1.4 and 1.8 terabits while the XP60’s three chips have 280, 560 and 720 gigabits of capacity.
