Broadcom Trident 5 / BCM78800 Series High-Capacity StrataXGS Trident 5 Programmable Ethernet Switch Series

The StrataXGS Trident 5 BCM78800 series is a family of Ethernet switch chips designed to address performance, capacity and service requirements for next-generation data center and cloud computing environments as well as high-bandwidth enterprise and mobile network applications. The Trident 5 architecture delivers compiler-driven, user-programmable forwarding and instrumentation capabilities at a very high port density, while maintaining minimum power, latency and board footprint. Trident 5 is designed to provide an optimal Top of Rack (ToR switch) solution.

Trident 5 introduces a new on-chip, neural-network inference engine called NetGNT (Networking General-purpose Neural-network Traffic-analyzer). NetGNT is an ML inference engine and can be trained to look for different types of traffic patterns that span the entire chip. For example, NetGNT can look for a traffic pattern common in AI/ML workloads, called “incast,” in which many packet flows all converge on the same port and buffer at roughly the same time, causing congestion. NetGNT can recognize this pattern in real-time as it begins, and invoke congestion-control techniques to avoid degraded network performance. And since NetGNT runs in hardware at full line rate, there is no impact to throughput or Ethernet switch latency.

Trident 5 has extensive features to address the rapidly increasing scale of data center network switch deployments and distributed computing applications such as running AI/ML workloads. These features include flexible in-band and streaming telemetry, large-scale forwarding databases with flexible allocations to allow tailoring to the required application, and support for the latest in datacenter protocols.

To enable high network utilization, Trident 5 features a wide variety of load balancing and congestion management technologies including Dynamic Load Balancing, Dynamic Group Multipathing, Resilient Hashing, Latency-Based ECN marking, and Elephant Flow detection/re-prioritization.

Trident 5 is programmed using the NPL high-level language. Customers can use off-the-shelf NPL applications from Broadcom or can license the NPL DIY environment and develop their own customized applications. For more information on NPL.