Cisco announced their new QuantumFlow Processor last week and will announce which box it will be used in on March 4th . It’s a beast with 800M transistors, 40 cores, support for 160 simultaneous processes, > 100 engineers, > 40 patent submissions, and a rumoured $100M dev cost.
It’s interesting that Cisco has had a some major hardware announcements lately. With all the “application” acquistions last year I had thought they were becoming more software oriented. Here is a good post on what the new Nexus hardware means for software at Cisco. Will Cisco’s ‘Big Switch’ Provoke a New Technology War? - Seeking Alpha. The comments attatched to the post are interesting too ( read them )
Here are links to articles on Quantum Flow device … all are pretty thin. Network World one has some rumours …
- Cisco QuantumFlow mystery network processor - Network World
- Cisco’s QuantumFlow Processor: Meet World’s Most Advanced Networking Semiconductor - The first power-users: Santa Claus, Cupid and the Easter Bunny - Softpedia
- Cisco Introduces World’s Most Advanced Networking Semiconductor: Cisco QuantumFlow Processor -> News@Cisco
March 3, 2008 at 2:04 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptHere is a good post on what the new Nexus hardware means for software at Cisco. Will Cisco’s ‘Big Switch’ Provoke a New Technology War? - Seeking Alpha. The comments attatched to the post are interesting too ( read them ) … [...]
March 3, 2008 at 2:50 pm
* speculation — my guess is that this NPU gets used in an Edge Router
** I’ve seen other speculation like this. we’ll know tomorrow.
* that has historically been the first deployment of Cisco’s past multi-core NPUs.
April 23, 2008 at 10:23 am
[...] feels like Cisco’s Quantum Flow device thought process. I’ll speculate that it goes like this “We are the leader - we are the [...]
May 29, 2008 at 9:24 am
[...] enterprise focussed silicon. Makes sense, these guys can’t compete with likes of a Cisco’s QFP. They are choosing to compete where they have a [...]