At Cisco Live, Cisco announced its next Cloud Scale ASIC. Specifically, it announced it’s 25.6 Tbps (512x56G) ASIC for shipment in early 2021. Cisco became the third vendor to announce a 25.6 Tbps ASIC this year, which we see as a higher volume class of ASIC than 12.8 Tbps ASICs. At the same time, Cisco also announced a new line card on the Nexus 9500. Cisco’s ASICs have ramped significantly in the Nexus 9K since the platforms market introduction and has continued to gain traction is the DC ASIC business as the Nexus 9K ramps in the Cloud as a strong alternative to Broadcom.
The company continued to push for 800G QSFP-DD, maintaining the companies position of DD as the form factor of choice for optics instead of OSFP as industry consensus on form factor is still fractured.
The Nexus 9K continues to strengthen the software features and offerings for Enterprise and Cloud customers, and we expect the Nexus 9K to expand more into the DCI space with 400 Gbps compared to previous iterations of the Nexus 9K. We believe Cisco’s tools around telemetry and security will make for compelling solutions in today’s multi-cloud environment.
