The Broadcom® BCM78900 family is a class of high-radix, high-bandwidth network switching devices supporting up to 64 × 800GbE, 128 × 400GbE, or 256 × 200GbE ports. The device family features a maximum of 64 integrated Peregrine SerDes cores, each with eight integrated 106-Gb/s PAM4 SerDes transceivers and associated PCS for native support of numerous physical connectivity options, enabling a broad range of media, speed and reach. The BCM78900 delivers high-bandwidth, glueless network connectivity of up to 51.2 Tb/s on a single chip.

The BCM78900 is a high-performance and high-capacity device designed to meet the requirements for next-generation data center and cloud computing environments. The BCM78900 architecture delivers complete L2 and L3 switching, routing, and tunneling capabilities at line rate and maximum port density, with low power and latency. Software compatibility is maintained across the StrataXGS® product portfolio to simplify customer designs and reduce customer time-to-market.

As server interfaces transition to higher Ethernet speeds and virtualization continues to increase link utilization, data center networks demand switches with dense 50GbE to 800GbE connectivity at the edge and aggregation layers. With up to 64 × [PM8x100] SerDes and flexibility in configuring 50GbE, 100GbE, 200GbE, 400GbE, and 800GbE ports, a single BCM78900 switching chip can be used to build scalable, cost-effective leaf, spine, blade, and aggregation switches across the entire data center.

Features

World’s highest radix of 200GbE ports: 256 ports supported on a single chip, enabling flat, low latency AI/ML clusters
The industry’s most advanced 51.2Tbps shared-buffer architecture, providing the highest performance and lowest tail latency for RoCEv2 and other new RDMA protocols
Advanced adaptive routing, dynamic load balancing, and support for end-to-end congestion control capabilities specifically designed to handle the large, low entropy flows typical of AI/ML workloads
Support for Clos and non-Clos topologies such as torus, Dragonfly, Dragonfly+, and Megafly
Hardware-based link failover for improved network resiliency and reduced JCT

Applications

Single-chip solution for data center aggregation, edge and spine switches
Data center fixed and chassis/modular switches
AI/ML clusters
Cloud computing
Large-scale enterprise backbone

StrataXGS Tomahawk 5 Series Key Benefits

Enables the next generation of converged data center infrastructure with 64 ports of 800GbE switching and routing
Virtualization of general compute and AI/ML workloads with single-pass VxLAN routing and bridging
Unparalleled physical I/O options using 512 instances of the industry’s highest performance, most flexible, and longest-reach 100G PAM4 SerDes
High-precision PTP and SyncE time synchronization
Six on-chip ARM processors for high-bandwidth, fully-programmable streaming telemetry and sophisticated embedded applications such as on-chip statistics summarization
Unmatched power efficiency, implemented as a monolithic 5nm die

Compared to general compute and storage, AI/ML training clusters have unique communication patterns. To minimize job completion time, Tomahawk 5 adds specific features for these workloads and network topologies.

Categories

broadcom