We are on the verge of a new era of switches with the Broadcom Tomahawk 5 based 51.2T Bailly Co-Packaged Optics Switch shown yesterday, and today’s announcement of the Marvell Teralynx 10 switch. This is another 51.2T switch that is designed for the 800GbE era.
Marvell Teralynx 10 Announced for 51.2T 800GbE Switching
The Marvell Teralynx 10 is a higher-performance switch with 512x 112G SerDes for up to 32x 1.6Tbps links, 64x 800Gps links, and so forth. It also brings Flashlight telemetry, programmable forwarding, and other Teralynx features to the platform. Since it is four times faster, one can either have a faster network or a reduced radix. Marvell says that this quadrupling in performance replaces four 12.8T class switches (e.g. the 32x 400GbE switch we looked at previously.) That is due to the reduction in ports used for switch-to-switch uplinks to service the same number of ports.
The Teralynx brand comes from the Marvell-Innovium acquisition. We previously covered the Innovium platforms as well as taking apart a 12.8T switch, in the Inside an Innovium Teralynx 7-based 32x 400GbE switch piece and accompanying video:
As we mentioned during Broadcom’s recent announcement, we have a 64x 400GbE switch in the lab that you will see on STH this month.
Final Words
Marvell said that the Teralynx 7 generation of switches, as one can see above, has shipped around 5 million ports of 400GbE. The 51.2T generation is one where we will start to see co-packaged optics and other solutions making newer switches look a lot different than previous generations. Marvell says the chip will sample later in Q2 so we probably still have a few quarters until we see Teralynx 10 in switches, especially ones that non-hyper scalers can buy. Today’s PCIe Gen5 speeds only support 400GbE links. It will not be until PCIe Gen6 in 2-3 years that we expect to see 800GbE even start being used in mainstream servers and storage gear. So these are a bit ahead of a good portion of the market.
