Broadcom Qumran3D 5nm 25.6T Switch Router Chip

This is one that we are late in covering, but Broadcom announced a new 25.6Tbps router chip built on 5nm process technology. Today we are clearing the drafts folder and the Broadcom Qumran3D is the company’s next-generation StrataDNX switch for 100Gbps to 800Gbps port connectivity.

Broadcom Qumran3D 5nm 25.6T Switch Router Chip

The new Broadcom Qumran3D is designed with 256x 100Gbps links utilizing 100G PAM4 SerDes. The new chips have built-in HBM memory for their packet buffer as traditional off-package DRAM is too slow and with too high of latency. You can see the HBM packages, similar to a GPU, AI accelerator, or Xeon Max in the picture above. There appear to be two main switching tiles each with two HBM packages next to them.

Here are the key features from Broadcom:

• 25.6Tb/s forwarding capacity per device
• Advanced, flexible and elastic packet processor
• Integrated accelerators for carrier service management
• Carrier feature support including Ethernet OAM, MPLS, Segment Routing and more
• Integrated hierarchical traffic manager with support for thousands of flows
• Scalable, low power high bandwidth packet buffer memory supporting HBM
• Elastic Pipe — centralized, fungible databases and programmable elements matrix
• Support for 25GbE, 50GbE, 100GbE, 200GbE, 400GbE, 800GbE Ethernet port interfaces
• Support for line-rate MACSec and IPSec encryption / decryption on all ports
• Feature Rich Instrumentation and Telemetry leveraging hardware based accelerators

(Source: Broadcom)

Final Words

As 400GbE adoption has been picking up with AI servers and PCIe Gen5 being able to drive 400Gbps connections off of a single port, having 800GbE uplinks and 400GbE connectivity is top of mind these days.

Hopefully, we see these switches hit the market sooner rather than later. We tend to cover more of the Tomahawk and Trident series switches, but perhaps we will look at these in the future. Broadcom says that the new BCM88870 parts are shipping to customers this quarter, so we would expect to start seeing switches based on the designs next year in 2024 assuming all goes well.