At OCP Summit 2023, we saw a few cool switches in the Wistron booth that we wanted to highlight. We were a bit surprised that the company had more than 800GbE switches on display. At the edge of the booth, we found two very different 2.5GbE PoE++ switches.
Wistron DS-6183-640 64-port 800GbE Switch
Wistron had its 64-port OSFP switch with a few notable enhancements. The system has dual SFP+ management ports as well as a RJ45 management port. On the console port side, there is another RJ45 jack, but a bit different is the Type-C console port.
Inside the switch, we get a Broadcom Tomahawk 5 51.2Tbps switch chip under a large heatsink. We saw a taller version cooling the 64-port 400GbE Tomahawk 4 switch we tore down in that review.
One of the bigger changes is the CPU. This system uses an Intel Xeon D-1713NT part of the Ice Lake-D series. Ice Lake-D is a relatively newer embedded part, so that is great to see.
Here is the video on the Intel Xeon D series that we did for the launch of the new line, and this is the D-1700, not the D-2700 series.
Still, there was another, perhaps more exciting switch next to this one.
Wistron 32-port 800GbE and 64-port 400GbE Switch
This switch might have actually been a technology demo. We can see the normal OSFP+ ports we might expect for a 32-port 800GbE solution, but there are also 64 ports of 400GbE via Optical SN in the 16 blue ports on the top row of ports (4x 400GbE per port.)
Looking inside the Broadcom tomahawk switch, we can see both optical outputs as well as copper-cabled outputs. We learned not to call these by name since each vendor has its own name for the copper parts.
Here, Wistron is showing the cabled connections from both TE Connectivity and Amphenol along with those optical connections. Something is certain, these demos look a lot different than the standard Tomahawk 4 switches we have seen as power, cooling, and signal integrity continue to be challenges.
The rest of the demo switch was relatively mundane.
While this was a cool 96-port switch demo, we saw something at the other end of the spectrum around the corner.
Wistron 2.5GbE PoE++ Switches at OCP Summit 2023
These two switches look very similar. They are 32-ports of 1GbE, 16-ports of 2.5GbE, and each also has 4-ports of 25GbE for uplinks. The model numbers we cannot find online, but they are the ES-2222-52TS-P and ES-2112-52TS-P.
One of the switches is based on the Marvell 98DX3530M switch chip and an AMD V1500B COMe module. One can see antenna connections on the front, and that can be for M.2 WiFi or 5G/LTE options.
The other switch is very similar, except that it comes with the Broadcom Trident 3-X2 (BCM56275) switch chip. Trident is a much lower-end campus/ edge switch chip than the Tomahawk high-performance line Wistron showed in the 800GbE switches.
Both of these switches support 90W PoE++ on both the 32 ports of 1GbE and 16 ports of 2.5GbE.
Final Words
Overall, these were some cool switches. Wistron typically only sells to hyper-scalers, but if we ever get a chance, we will review these switches as some are higher-end which is always fun to look at and we have also been making an effort to review 2.5GbE switches this year to help push that market.
