Cisco slips on a Tolkien ring: One chip design to rule them all, one design to find them. One design to bring them all...

Cisco has launched a single chip architecture that it claims will work well in network routing and switching gear, and manage data better than existing processors in both categories. At an event in San Francisco it called “Internet for the Future,” Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins said the new design – which the US tech giant is …

[john.jones.name]

great single source...

why would I pay cisco when they cant ship high bandwidth designs now in the future ?

Ericsson, Nokia and Infinera are shipping SDN like products now and thats what customers want...

[sbt]

For every dollar spent on a piece of equipment, you spent $15 operating it

Sure, if you go with a proprietary vendor who rips you for support.

Based on the Broadcom comparison, I reckon they've sacrificed some natural 'Moore's Law' performance gain in the new generation for convergence.

[Duncan Macdonald]

15 to 1 ????

The only way to get close to that figure is with cheap unmanaged switches (8 port GbE switches are under £10 new on eBay) and count all the cost of cabling as part of the support cost. Most managed switches and routers are only reconfigured a few times before they are replaced so given their much higher purchase cost, the support cost should be lower compared to the purchase cost - unless of course the manufacturer provides such buggy software that an expensive support contract is a necessity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 15 to 1 ????

How about WAN costs?

On the LAN side, I suspect you are right about counting structured cabling in the costs.

I also suspect they are including a figure for downtime based on estimated availability which will depend on the environment... i.e. debatable

[IJD]

Re: 15 to 1 ????

This is nothing to to with the cheap end-user GbE switches mentioned above, this is stuff that builds the Internet backbone and ships terabits or petabits around and comes with typically a six-digit price tag...

[Evil Harry]

This is an interesting move and I genuinely hope it goes well for them. Outside some niche areas, Cisco in my experience have moved from market leaders to being on the back foot to the point of almost becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's old school Cisco - develop in-house chips that outperform the competition and better match market requirements.

However....

While Cisco's chips do generally outperform the competition on release, the move to merchant silicon that receives performance updates every 12-18 months has meant Cisco quickly loses the performance crown. Cisco usually take 4-5 years between new chips although I suspect they could easily halve that with a architecture/shrink model but then have the additional costs of doing so versus off-the-shelf or customised merchant silicon.

Add in the effect of a significant portion of network spend moving to the cloud providers that mostly design their own kit, Cisco are facing increased competition and a rapidly declining market.

Fun times...

[Avatar of They]

One chip to rule them all

... and in the darkness bind them.

That the NSA controlled back door in Cisco kit then?

That isn't there, honest.

[vgrig_us]

so, more...

...bs from Cisco? Just another day...

[scarper]

Yet another grand unification

When I worked there, Cisco's chip problem was that they had 'way too many designs. When you're big, and a bit old, and have bought a lot of companies, and have out-of-control competition between divisions, and have a broad product line, well, the pile of designs gets real high. By chip industry standards, Cisco wasn't buying anything much "in volume" except RAM. That creates a financial barrier to doing rapid design refreshes.

So it isn't surprising that they're trying, again, to get more commonality across products.

[Dave 13]

Magic sauce?

Honestly, there *is* no magic sauce in pushing packets around. Cisco has depended on the FUD that there *is* for decades. The rest of the world moves on..