Today, Marvell is announcing that its Teralynx 10 51.2T switch chip is being produced in volume. The new 5nm switch chip can offer up to 64 ports of 800GbE, or 512 ports of 100GbE. At the same time, the company is also announcing SONiC support for Teralynx 10, which is a big deal in the open networking community.
Marvell Teralynx 10 51.2T Switch in Volume Production with SONiC Support
Just to give you some sense on how the 51.2T switch market is set to explode, Marvell had a nugget in its press release:
Shipments of 51.2 Tbps switches are expected to skyrocket from approximately 77,000 in 2024 to 1.8 million in 2028, a 120% CAGR, according to 650 Group. (Source: Marvell and 650 Group)
Here is the 650 Group’s projection for today’s common ~12.8T switches and where the 51.2T market is going:
That is a major reason Patrick wanted to do a piece on this generation.
The new switches are designed for high bandwidth but also consistently low latency.
With the ability to split the 64 ports of 800G into 512 ports of 100G, the switch has a high radix. For example, 256 100G links can be used for downstream devices while higher capacity links can be used to link other switching layers. This flexibility can lower the need for switches in larger clusters.
Aside from the higher radix reducing the need for more switching layers, the power consumption is lower with 800GbE. One can see the 800GbE optics in Marvell’s example use 50% more power than the 400GbE optics, but overall, the new 5nm part ends up yielding half the power per 100GbE link as the 12.8T Teralynx 7 generation. This is also a big driver for using newer and higher-capacity switches, as they increase in speed, the power per bit decreases.
Aside from the announcement that Teralynx 10 hit volume production, the other announcement is that Teralynx 10 has SONiC support.
Innovium (acquired by Marvell for its Teralynx line) was all-in on SONiC, so it is great to see that continue.
Final Words
Given that the 51.2T switch market is projected to be huge, we wanted to show folks the new switches early.
If you want to learn more about Teralynx 10, you can check out our video here:
Did they really need to produce a marketing graphic showing that 1 was 50% of 2?