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...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
