Innovium launched its newest switch chip solution, the TERALYNX 5. While the company’s TERALYNX 7 has seen wins in some Cisco switching along with cloud provider products, it is a decidedly higher-end switch chip. The Innovium TERALYNX 5 is a lower-cost switch chip that is designed for 1.2Tbps to 6.4Tbps operation yet still has the company’s signature large buffers, low latency, and line-rate analytics.
Innovium TERALYNX 5
The Innovium TERALYNX 5 family can feature up to 128 ports on its switch fabric that range from 10G to 400G speeds. The company is supporting PAM4 interfaces for higher density as well. The TERALYNX 5 is designed to have features such as the RoCE support, low latency operation, large buffers, and FLASHLIGHT v2 telemetry engine that are similar to the company’s TERALYNX 7 line, just in a smaller footprint for lower-cost switch form factors.
With this family, Innovium is targeting everything from half-width switches popular in installations such as what Dell sells with VMware appliances for smaller customers, to up to 100GbE and 400GbE switches.
Innovium finds itself competing in a field of giants. Broadcom has a range of very popular switch chips such as those in the multi-generational the Tomahawk and Trident families. Intel’s Barefoot Networks is another attempt by Intel to get into the high-end switch silicon game. Innovium says that the TERALYNX 5 will provide the best performance per dollar and performance per watt of the options available.
A big part of why the TERALYNX 5 is out stems from the company wanting to get a lower cost and power solution out for the 5G edge and IoT space. The goal is for telcos and others to be able to use a common set of tools from edge switches all the way to the data center.
Innovium says that there are already OSes such as the popular SONiC solution, Cisco NXOS, as well as cloud provider network OS stacks that are already designed for TERALYNX 7 that should be quickly available on TERALYNX 5.
Availability
We were told that the TERALYNX 5 would start seeing silicon samples in Q4 2019 and will hit mass production in early 2020. That means we could start seeing switches with the TERALYNX 5 in the first half of 2020.
