Cisco unveils new AI networking chip, taking on Broadcom and Nvidia

SAN FRANCISCO: Cisco Systems on Tuesday launched a new chip and router designed to speed information through massive data centers that will compete against offerings from Broadcom and Nvidia for a piece of the $600 billion AI infrastructure spending boom.

Cisco said its Silicon One G300 switch chip, expected to go on sale in the second half of the year, will help the chips that train and deliver AI systems talk to each other over hundreds of thousands of links.

The chip will be made with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s 3-nanometer chipmaking technology and will have several new “shock absorber” features designed to help networks of AI chips from bogging down when hit with large spikes of data traffic, Martin Lund, executive vice president of Cisco’s common hardware group, told Reuters in an interview.

Cisco expects the chip to help some AI computing jobs get done 28% faster, in part by re-routing data around any problems in the network automatically, within microseconds.

“This happens when you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of connections - it happens quite regularly,” Lund said. “We focus on the total end-to-end efficiency of the network.”

Networking has become a key competitive field in AI. When Nvidia unveiled its newest systems last month, one of the six key chips in the system was a networking chip that competes with Cisco’s offerings. Broadcom is going after the same market with its “Tomahawk” series of chips.