Cisco says its new 51.2-terabit G302 switch chip will ship before the end of the year

A network lead who watched the keynote and wants something on Monday's purchase request should sort the lineup by date first. In SiliconANGLE's account, the chips have dates and so does one software feature. The G302 is the smaller of the two chips, at 51.2 Tb/s against the G300's 102.4 ^[14]. Live Protect, the runtime security feature in the new SONiC release, comes next year ^[12]. The optical module and the Cisco 8001 management system have no date, and the report states no price for any product ^[13].

Cisco's pitch is openness. It says the network should be rebuilt as a coherent, programmable architecture so operators can swap out components from different vendors ^[3]. The chips, though, belong to Cisco's own Silicon One family ^[4]. The optical module is a joint design with Nvidia, built to speed transmission between Nvidia's GPUs ^[7]. The open piece the report names outright is SONiC, an open-source network operating system ^[12]. A buyer can test the openness claim by asking whether a second vendor's part fits the same slot.

Nvidia's Gilad Shainer framed the module as a beginning. "Building the world's largest AI factories starts with rethinking the smallest of connections," he said ^[10]. He added that Nvidia and Cisco "are building an ecosystem to reinvent pluggable optics" ^[10].

Cisco says the module packs 16 full-duplex lanes for up to 12.8 Tb/s ^[8]. Sixteen lanes at 400 Gb/s is 6.4 Tb/s one way, so the 12.8 figure counts both directions ^[15]. The four-times bandwidth density and 1.3-times power efficiency are stated against existing 200G optics, and they are Cisco's numbers ^[8].

The G302's interface runs at 200G ^[6] and the module is built for 400G lanes ^[7], a factor of two ^[16]. On those numbers the two are not an obvious pair, and Cisco would need to say which switch silicon drives the module.

Cisco lists hyperscalers, neoclouds and enterprises as buyers ^[1]. The problem it describes is clusters of thousands of GPUs and other accelerators ^[2].

We'd sort every item with a two-by-two. One axis is whether Cisco stated a date. The other is whether the part needs someone else's hardware to work. The G300, the G302 and Live Protect land in the dated column. The optical module is undated and dependent, since it is built around Nvidia's GPUs ^[7]. The 8001 is undated and runs on Cisco's own A100 chips ^[11]. Nothing in this lineup is both dated and dependent. Order from the dated column on Monday and send the rest to the account team as questions. The cost is that the module, the item with the biggest performance claim, waits in the questions column.