Broadcom has a new enterprise switch chip in its Trident 5-X12. This new chip carries on the line that we have seen before including in our FS N8560-48BC review. Broadcom says the new 5nm chip can double bandwidth while still running at 25% lower power.
Broadcom Trident 5-X12 with 800GbE and AI Launched
Broadcom is using 100G PAM4 SerDes as well as 50GbE to 800GbE MACs for the new switch. With 160x 100G PAM4 SerDes, it offers a lot of flexibility in terms of different port configurations. Broadcom also has the new NetGNT feature which apparently can be trained to detect traffic patterns to automatically alleviate potential issues on the switch.
Also, we see a new PCIe Gen5 host interface to things like a management processor. Another interesting feature is that 25GbE is still present on the switch, but not on the main switch complex. Instead, the four 25G ports are management ports in this generation. It is wild to think that while there are still servers being deployed with 10GbE networking, the next-gen 25GbE is already being relegated to management as the starting speed on this switch is 50G.
Just for some point of comparison, here is the previous generation Trident 4-X11 that we covered previously on STH.
We did not cover the Trident 3 launch, but we did cover it in reviews such as in our Dell EMC S5248F-ON Review.
The Trident line tends to be more of the enterprise switch line whereas the Tomahawk tends to be the family used for the highest-performance switches.
Final Words
While Broadcom is shipping the Trident 5-X12 BCM78800 to select customers now, it will probably take some time to see it in products. We covered the Broadcom StrataXGS Trident 4 7nm 32x400GbE Switch ASIC Sampling in 2019.
Hopefully, we will get to review switches with the new Trident 5 in 2024, but that may still be early.
