Cisco launched its Silicon One G300 AI networking chip in a move that aims to compete with Nvidia and Broadcom.

[Daniel Nenni]

The Cisco Silicon One G300 was announced at Cisco Live EMEA and headlined a bevy of product announcements. Silicon One G300 powers Cisco's new N9000 and Cisco 8000 switches and offers 102.4 Tbps switching speeds in liquid cooled systems for hyperscalers, neoclouds, sovereign clouds and enterprises.

Cisco is surrounding its new AI networking chip and switches with Nexus One, a management platform that provides a unified fabric as well as native Splunk integration and AI job observability.

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, said the company was focused on "innovating across the full stack - from silicon to systems and software."

According to Cisco, the network is critical to AI training and inference to get the most out of GPU investments. Silicon One G300 and the Cisco switches it powers are likely to compete with Nvidia's Mellanox InfiniBand and Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics switch system as well as Broadcom's offerings such as its XPU and Tomahawk switches.

If you zoom out, Cisco's AI networking chips are another data point that Nvidia is getting a lot more competition. Custom silicon from the likes of AWS and Google Cloud and AMD offerings also indicate more choices other than Nvidia.

Key points about Silicon One G300 and the new switches from Cisco.

- Silicon One G300 has Intelligent Collective Networking, which features a shared packet buffer, path-based load balancing and proactive network telemetry.
- The AI networking chip responds to bursts, link failures and packet drops to deliver 33% increased network utilization.
- Silicon One G300 is programmable to be upgraded for new network functionality and has a unified architecture.
- Cisco N9000 and Cisco 8000 have 1.6T OSFP (Octal Small Form-factor Pluggable) Optics and 800G Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO) to halve power consumption.
- The company expanded its Silicon One P200-based systems for hyperscale deployments.

In addition to Cisco's AI silicon and new switches, the company also announced the following at Cisco Live EMEA.

Cisco upgraded AgenticOps with new platform additions to add autonomous actions and oversight. The company launched AgenticOps a year ago.

AgenticOps is upgraded with autonomous troubleshooting for campus, branch and industrial networks, context-aware optimization, trusted validation, experience metrics and workflow creation.

Cisco AI Defense, also launched a year ago, was upgraded with tools to secure the AI supply chain as well as AI agents.

The company said new features for Cisco AI Defense include AI Bill of Materials, which provides visibility into MCP servers and third parties; MCP Catalog, which inventories and manages risk across MCP servers; testing of models and agents in multiple languages; and real-time guardrails.

Cisco launches Silicon One G300, new Nexus switches, AI ops tools | Constellation Research

Cisco launched its Silicon One G300 AI networking chip in a move that aims to compete with Nvidia and Broadcom. The Cisco Silicon One G300 was announced at Cisco Live EMEA and headlined a bevy of product announcements. Silicon One G300 powers Cisco's new N9000 and Cisco 8000 switches and offers...

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[Daniel Nenni]

Designed by Cisco in partnership with TSMC on the N3 process. Winning!

 

[blueone]

I suspect the future success of merchant datacenter network switch ASICs based on Ethernet, like this example, will be in decline, just like what's happening with merchant CPUs from Intel and AMD. Ethernet is a legacy network, based on technologies mostly from 20-30 years ago. It is being almost completely displaced in client deployments by 802.11 WIFI. While it still is the only practical solution for enterprise datacenters, as cloud computing continues to suck growth out of enterprise computing, the big cloud computing companies will likely be drawn to Google's and Nvidia's proprietary silicon path. The Ethernet industry is making a last stand for technology leadership with the Ultra Ethernet and UALink specifications, but they are hampered by the IEEE 802.1 and 802.3 committees, which are mired in tradition and compatibility with features from decades ago. And UE and UALink are still defined by multi-company committees, rather than tight, one-company internal teams with strong visionary leaders. Focused teams usually beat industry committees hampered by corporate politics.

I wonder, will an Arm-style IP company emerge for datacenter networking as Arm has for server CPUs? I can't believe it won't. Chiplets and improved chip design tools seem to make the problem more easily solvable.

 

[swka]

I suspect the future success of merchant datacenter network switch ASICs based on Ethernet, like this example, will be in decline, just like what's happening with merchant CPUs from Intel and AMD. Ethernet is a legacy network, based on technologies mostly from 20-30 years ago. It is being almost completely displaced in client deployments by 802.11 WIFI. While it still is the only practical solution for enterprise datacenters, as cloud computing continues to suck growth out of enterprise computing, the big cloud computing companies will likely be drawn to Google's and Nvidia's proprietary silicon path. The Ethernet industry is making a last stand for technology leadership with the Ultra Ethernet and UALink specifications, but they are hampered by the IEEE 802.1 and 802.3 committees, which are mired in tradition and compatibility with features from decades ago. And UE and UALink are still defined by multi-company committees, rather than tight, one-company internal teams with strong visionary leaders. Focused teams usually beat industry committees hampered by corporate politics.

I wonder, will an Arm-style IP company emerge for datacenter networking as Arm has for server CPUs? I can't believe it won't. Chiplets and improved chip design tools seem to make the problem more easily solvable.

Ethernet has been like Moore's law, claimed to be dying every year, yet still being pushed forward. Wonder what's the % of deployment in cloud networking are on Ethernet. We have seen latest scale up/across to add Ethernet support.

Those IEEE committee has been a source of problem more than help. It feels like every successful innovation driving initial market massive deployment is done outside IEEE, or at least before it's fully endorsed. One typical example is PAM4.

as for networking IP, it's an interesting idea/angle. I would think one major issue there is unlike server chips, networking have to be hard IP, with close interaction with up and down stream vendors to make the system work.

 

[blueone]

Ethernet has been like Moore's law, claimed to be dying every year, yet still being pushed forward. Wonder what's the % of deployment in cloud networking are on Ethernet. We have seen latest scale up/across to add Ethernet support.

Anybody who has predicted Ethernet's death must have their nose in Jack Daniel's.

At this time, I'd estimate over 90% of cloud networking is still on Ethernet, in one form or another. The network interface cards/chips have become proprietary, but the switches and links (outside of Google) are still Ethernet. Nvidia has two essentially proprietary networks, NVLink and InfiniBand (IB is no longer an open industry spec, and Nvidia is the only commercial implementation, so I count it as proprietary), but they are also a substantial provider of Ethernet adapters and switches.

Nonetheless, if you read the description of the Cisco switch ASIC, unless they support the legacy Ethernet specifications (e.g. Spanning Tree Protocol), most of the top-line features are proprietary, and only work in networks with other Cisco switches of the same generation. The primary Ethernet features the Cisco ASIC supports are the PHY and Link layers. The current PHYs are great, but the 802.3 Link spec is a Jurassic mess. This is why Ultra Ethernet and UL Link were created, to work around the antiquated Ethernet specs.

Those IEEE committee has been a source of problem more than help. It feels like every successful innovation driving initial market massive deployment is done outside IEEE, or at least before it's fully endorsed. One typical example is PAM4.

Agreed.

as for networking IP, it's an interesting idea/angle. I would think one major issue there is unlike server chips, networking have to be hard IP, with close interaction with up and down stream vendors to make the system work.

I'm not so sure hard IP is a requirement for the big cloud companies. I don't know enough about their design flows to agree or disagree. I think they use soft IP for CPU cores and associated blocks (like memory controllers), why not for network switches?

 

[swka]

I'm not so sure hard IP is a requirement for the big cloud companies. I don't know enough about their design flows to agree or disagree. I think they use soft IP for CPU cores and associated blocks (like memory controllers), why not for network switches?

I believe it has a lot to do with PHYs. There are control and algorithmic part of the networking that have had soft IP. But to meet the overall system ever increasing speed and bandwidth needs, you need to co-design more with PHY.