What Is An Ethernet

"This is the first time someone has built a protocol-independent ASIC, as far as we know," Monson says. "The funny thing [is that] there isn't much difference between the two, Ethernet and InfiniBand, inside the chip. But don't get the wrong idea. When SwitchX is running as an Ethernet switch, it's not running in an emulated mode or in a wrapper. It is an Ethernet switch. And when it is running as InfiniBand, it is similarly not emulated or wrapped."

So SwitchX really does swing both ways. This isn't college experiment. And in that regard, the SwitchX ASIC is just like the multiprotocol ConnectX-2 host adapters that Mellanox launched 18 months ago.

A massive wafer-baking shrink and the advent of lossless Ethernet protocol enhancements (basically stolen from InfiniBand), among other things, have come together to make the converged SwitchX ASICs possible.

The current generation of InfiniScale IV chips, which Mellanox designed to support 40Gb/sec (quad data rate) InfiniBand, are implemented in a 90-nanometer process by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. That chip has around 450 million transistors and was able to power a switch in 2008 that pushed 10Gb/sec InfiniBand ports for under 75 watts at the ASIC level.

The SwitchX chip, which is the fifth generation of ASICs that Mellanox has cooked up, shrinks down to 40 nanometers and boosts the transistor count to 1.4 billion; it comes in a 45mm by 45mm package.

The SwitchX chip has a lot more functionality and burns a lot less juice, and at 4Tb/sec of unified switching and routing bandwidth, it packs a potent bandwidth punch. The SwitchX chip has 144 Serdes (serializer/deserializer) serial-parallel blocks, which can run at between 1Gb/sec and 14Gb/sec. The chip knows how to do InfiniBand, Ethernet, and Fibre Channel protocols and their hybrid variants.