Cisco tantalises with mystery chip and mystery event

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 26 February 2008 09:22

Business IT - Technology

Cisco has announced a new chip: the fruits of half a decade of research by a team of 100 engineers hailing it as "the most advanced piece of networking silicon in the world," but giving no indication what it intends to do with the device. However it could just be a prelude a big Cisco announcement scheduled for 4 March. Cisco claims that the new chip, dubbed the QuantumFlow Processor, is "the industry's first fully integrated and programmable networking chipset...[that] consists of 40 cores on a single chip and can perform up to 160 simultaneous processes."

However, other than saying that QuantumFlow is "uniquely geared for today's network environments and several generations beyond what is currently available in network processors," Cisco has said nothing about how it will be used.

It seems likely that it has been developed for a role in core network routing platforms. Cisco claims that many of the same engineers who developed the Cisco Silicon Packet Processor (SPP) for the Cisco Carrier Routing System (CRS-1), Cisco's top end core router for carrier networks which debuted in 2004, also worked on the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor. It says that continued advancements in technology, design and expertise enabled the team to increase the transistor density on the chip from a then networking-industry-leading 185 million on the Cisco SPP to more than 800 million on the QuantumFlow processor.

"Such density puts it in the tier of some of the most advanced processors developed by leading semiconductor companies," Cisco says. Some 40 patent applications have been submitted as result of the QuantumFlow's development.