It is the beginning of April 2020 and I have been working at home for a few weeks due to the global pandemic. Fortunately, I still have the Internet and some time to review the Network Field Day videos from February. One of the companies that I really wanted to review was Broadcom. This is because the topics were very interesting but complicated, in a good way.
Broadcom is a manufacturer of merchant silicon. Their customers are the vendors that make the equipment companies need to run their infrastructure including storage, optical, and networking components among other items. The company was formed over 50 years ago and has a heritage of AT&T/Bell Labs, Lucent, and Hewlett-Packard/Agilent, according to their website. Check out https://www.broadcom.com/company/about-us/company-history to see a history of the company over the years.
While they have a much longer list of products, we only discussed their processors for networking equipment. This included the Tomahawk, Trident, and Jericho processors – see above for actual the actual processors. If those names seem familiar, it is because Broadcom processors are named from US missile names. Based on what we heard, I think it is very appropriate for them to use missile names as these processors are blazingly fast. For instance, their Tomahawk4 processor can power a switch up to 25.6Tbps. This allows a switch to offer up to 256 100Gb Ethernet or 64 400Gb Ethernet ports using a single processor.
So, why did I want to review the Broadcom video? It was not because I was not paying attention but rather that it was a complicated conversation. The presenter on the Tomahawk4 processer, Ian Cox, was awesome and really smart. He talked about how Broadcom builds the processors including the system board connections. It was really interesting but sometimes hard to follow. I recommend highly to watch these videos (and maybe watch them again) as I cannot do them justice.
Ian is a very smart guy and I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him the night before the presentation. We talked about his motorcycle adventures and his work experiences. At the time of the presentation, he was relatively new to Broadcom, working there since February of 2018. Considering the Tomahawk4 took about 2.5 years from start to initial product, he could not have been there the entire time but he was still one of the lead engineers on the project. Now, Ian worked at Broadcom previously from 2013 to 2017 – obviously, he was given a good offer to come back. If you watch one of his presentations, you will see why Broadcom hired him.
As I said previously, I cannot do justice to the Broadcom presentations. You need to watch them yourselves. One thing I can say is that they make some great processors. Network equipment designed around these processers will help any company to have better networks. That infrastructure is what we need these days to get our traffic to where it needs to go, quickly. Go watch the presentations and see for yourself.
Disclaimer: I was a delegate for Network Field Day 22. Gestalt IT (https://gestaltit.com/) paid for my airfare, hotel, and some of the food while I was there, including the dinner I mentioned. Neither Broadcom nor Ian Cox give or offer me any money to write this blog post. This post is completely from me.